The Jack Eddy stories have been running in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine since the issue of October 1988. The following story published in the January/February 2008 issue was nominated for a Private Eye Writers of America SHAMUS award. It was also published in Volume 2 of The Case Files of Jack Eddy.
PANIC ON PORTAGE PATH
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he ransom note was delivered to the mansion on Portage Path on the postman's Monday morning round, the first of two on his schedule for the day. The crudely printed address did not contain a name, just the house number, street, and "city." After opening it along with the rest of the mail that had accumulated during their month at Bar Harbor, the residents, Quentin and Roberta Makepiece, were perplexed. The text consisted of letters cut from a magazine and newspaper. The message was concise: "If you pay $50,000 yor sun will be returned safely."
The Makepieces were in their seventies and their children, two daughters, were grown, married, and living far from Akron. Both had sons who were in their teens. After a hasty but concerned conference, Roberta Makepiece phoned their eldest daughter in Baltimore and then the other in California, forgetting the three hour difference in time. The latter, awakened from a sound sleep, grumpily agreed to check, then returned to the phone to say the two boys were safely in the bedroom they shared. The report from Baltimore had also been reassuring.
"Do you think it's someone's idea of a joke?" Mrs. Makepiece asked her husband.
"Not hardly. I think we had better notify the police."
Having arrived home late Sunday evening, the Makepieces were unaware of the excitement in the affluent neighborhood the previous Friday. On Saturday it had changed to panic, and by Sunday, to despair. Unknowing and unprepared, the response to Quentin's phone call left the elderly couple bewildered and more than a little frightened. Four Akron detectives were at their door within minutes, and close behind were two FBI agents. All doubt was removed that the letter might have been a poor joke.
I was making my rounds at Central Police Station when the call came in. After phoning Times-Press city editor Ben Goldsmith to say I was on my way to the west side and someone else would have to finish my routine checking of police reports, I hurried to where I had parked my 1934 Hupmobile. It was a fine car, an olive green sedan with black fenders and just a little more than fifty-five thousand miles on the odometer. It received rough treatment, though, in my haste to get to Portage Path, where I had spent much of the past three days. Sweat had soaked through my shirt by the time I arrived, and I was hoping that the remainder of August of 1938 would be cooler and less humid than the past week or two.
It had begun with a mass search of the neighborhood for the two-year-old son of a rubber company executive, Frederick Stauffer, and his wife, Joanne. The blond youngster called Bobby had been playing on the front lawn of a sprawling redbrick home directly across from the unoccupied residence of the Makepieces'. His nanny, a large woman in her forties named Prudence Longfellow, said she had a sudden and urgent need to use the bathroom and felt it would be perfectly safe to leave her charge alone for a few minutes. When she returned he was gone.
More than a dozen policemen were soon on the scene and the fruitless search was underway.
Portage Path was part of the route that Indians had followed while portaging their canoes between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. It was a street of stately homes occupied by those who had hit it big in the rubber industry and other lucrative businesses. I couldn't help but wonder if the response would have been the same had it been a child in Kenmore, East Akron, or some other working-class neighborhood.
There had been a possible witness to the kidnapping. The maid at the house to the south of the Stauffers' said she had been looking out a first-floor window when the nanny made her hurried trip inside. Within seconds, the maid said, a brown panel truck had pulled into the Stauffer's driveway, blocking her view of the child. Again, within seconds, the truck had backed out onto the street. The child was nowhere to be seen.
The maid had not noticed the number of the truck's license plate. In a short time she appeared less certain of the truck's color and a little unsure of herself in telling the police that crude white lettering on the panel read JOE’S RADIO SHOP. The wording, she said, was not the work of a professional sign painter and might even have been cut from some sort of material and applied with adhesive.
Although the area within a hundred miles of Akron was canvassed by police, they failed to find a Joe's Radio Shop. The closest was a Joe's Radio Shack in a small town near Mansfield, but the proprietor did not own a truck and had an airtight alibi for the day of the kidnapping.
A second letter arrived at the Makepiece house the following day. It said the nanny, unaccompanied by the police or anyone else, was to deliver the ransom money in well-circulated, small-denomination bills. She was to walk south along Seiberling Street in East Akron the following night with the money in a satchel. When the contact was made and the money handed over, the child would be given to her. If there was any sign of police in the area the boy would be killed. This note was handwritten by someone more literate than the writer of the first.
The police and FBI agents insisted on a presence in the neighborhood, one which offered little opportunity for concealment. The Stauffers were adamant in their refusal. Their only interest, they insisted, was the return of their son, not the apprehension of the kidnappers. They were emphatic in warning that if their wishes were not respected and anything went wrong they would make sure the resulting publicity reflected poorly on both the Akron police department and the FBI.
And so it was done their way, although the nanny appeared reluctant until reminded that it was her negligence that was responsible for the boy's abduction. An hour after she set out, walking south from East Market Street, a passing motorist saw the nanny lying beside the road. She had been hit on the head, but the wound was superficial. She said a car had pulled up beside her, a man had jumped out, grabbed the satchel, and struck her. It all happened so fast, she said, that she couldn't identify either the man or make, model, or color of the car. Nothing had been seen of the missing child. No one doubted her word.
Then the story died. Slowly at first, then day by day, less mention was made, until finally, two months later, there had been nothing at all for some time. The FBI pulled out, then the Akron police, although both swore the case was on the front burner and would remain so. There had been no new developments, though, and few people expected any would come.
For me it had been a quiet couple of months. The girl of my dreams, Sue Baney, said she was through with me, so there had been no dates with her or anyone else. My social life, if it could be called that, consisted of two Saturday afternoons spent by myself at Old Forge Field watching East High's football team beat Maple Heights 53-0 and Buchtel 52-0. At least life was moving smoothly for the Orientals, although their remaining games might change all that.
Even the police beat had been rather routine, and nothing much was happening in the lives of the other tenants at Mrs. Bauer's boardinghouse on Dudley Street, the place I called home. Jack Eddy was complaining that the private eye business was too slow for his liking, pudgy Mabel Klosterman had a couple of unmemorable dates with her sometimes boyfriend, the burly and slow-witted Joe Kurtz, and pretty Kitty Bauer seemed to have lost interest in Jack Eddy and now was dating a poor man's imitation of Rudolph Valentine in his role of the sheik.
After three weeks had passed with no mention of the kidnapping in any area newspaper, I drove to Portage Path and talked with Joanne Stauffer. She was low in spirit, discouraged by the lack of results and apparent lack of attention the kidnapping of her son was receiving from law enforcement agencies. That's when I told her about Jack Eddy. For more than a year the assistant manager of the Akron branch of Wellington's National Detective Agency had occupied the room across the hall from mine at the east side boardinghouse.
She was interested. In her opinion there was nothing to lose by hiring a private agency to look into the case, and the Stauffers certainly could afford the cost, whatever it might be. While I was still there she called Jack Eddy and set up an appointment with him at her home for that afternoon.
October had turned suddenly cool and you could feel the creeping up of winter, but I put on a warm sweater and was waiting on the porch when Jack Eddy arrived home half an hour before supper time. As he parked his sleek 1932 Auburn sedan behind my car I went down the steps to meet him. "Are you on the Stauffer case?" I asked.
I wasn't surprised, of course, when he nodded his head before saying, "Thanks for the recommendation, buddy. Guess I owe you a favor." He made it sound like owing me a favor was tantamount to having root-canal surgery.
I knew he had followed the story at the time it was hot news. He never commented on it, at least not to me, but I had seen him shake his head on several occasions after reading one of my stories in the Times-Press.
"Think you can do any good?"
"How the hell would I know at this point? The agency certainly can't do any worse than the police and those clowns from the Federal Bureau of Incompetency. It's too bad that Plato Largis was off on vacation in Greece or someplace at the time or the Akron cops might have figured it out."
"He's their best man, granted, but what could he have done that the other detectives didn't?"
"For starters he probably would have seen right away that the whole setup was phony. Those letters to the house across the street – what a joke they were. Do you honestly think that even the dumbest kidnappers wouldn't have known the right address for the Stauffers? Then there was the time they spent looking for that truck. All they had was the word of the next-door maid that it even existed. She was a loser from the word go, came across as either a complete idiot or a lousy liar. And they checked out the Stauffers' own maid and their cook to see if either had doctored the nanny's lunch to make her have that sudden need to rush to the bathroom. But tell me, what else did they do?"
"They checked out all the delivery people and other workers who came to the house. The yard man, for instance. The gas man, the mailman, those kinds of people."
"You're right, friend, they did all the routine things. The easy, obvious things. When something developed they hurried to investigate, but they were just putting out fires. Nobody was using any imagination."
"Well, the FBI agents—"
"Played like they were Melvin Purvis chasing Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. They tapped a couple of phones and waited for informants to give them a tip. That's what the FBI does best, but when it comes to knocking on doors and doing the legwork, they aren't too enthusiastic. The police should have put Plato Largis in charge as soon as he was back in town. He would have brought a little imagination to the job."
"Taking others off the case and giving it to him wouldn't have been following protocol."
Jack Eddy laughed, repeated "protocol" like it was a four letter word, and gave me a one-knuckle punch that left my right arm feeling paralyzed. After blinking back a few tears, I said, "So what are your plans?"
"Plans? Do you think we're waiting for Christmas or something? We started working on it as soon as I got back to the agency. I've got Cal Andres doing a background check on the maid next door and Cliff Austin doing the same on the nanny."
"The cops have done that, Jack."
"Yeah, sure they did. We look at things from a little different angle, buddy."
He could have said that again and been correct, but I didn't say so. The police were bound by a lot of rules that the Wellington Agency ignored. Sometimes their unorthodox methods produced results because they seldom worried about building a case to take to court. As a result, they were held in respect by citizens, scorned by less efficient cops and feared by criminals who knew the agency could get rough when someone like Jack Eddy felt it was a good idea.
Jack was a complex man, one I had never been able to figure out. He was excessively ambitious, determined to work his way to the top of Wellington's hierarchy, and he didn't much care how he did it or who got hurt along the way. On the other hand, I had seen him down on a dirty basement floor helping a kid with his Soap Box Derby car. Then, too, a couple of times when he thought I might be in over my head he had showed up unannounced and without a client to foot the bill. And thanks to Jack I had enjoyed the inside track on some good stories. But he could be ruthless when the need arose, as I had witnessed a few times. He stood only five eleven compared to my own six three, and his sandy brown hair was growing thin on top. That and his round Irish face could easily have led someone to think he might be a pushover. The truth was that Jack Eddy was hard as nails. I was always thankful to be on his good side and not someone he was hunting down.
I tapped on the door of his room late the next night. He had missed supper and only arrived home fifteen minutes earlier, obviously weary. "Where do things stand?" I asked.
"On the Stauffer case? Have you ever really looked over the layout there, buddy? The house to the north is quite a distance away and shielded by trees. On the other side of Portage Path the only house or yard with a view of the Stauffers is the Makepiece place, and they were away on vacation. That leaves those in the house to the south or someone in a car on the street as the only possible witnesses to the kidnapping. Traffic is light along there, the man in the next house was at work, and the woman was at a club meeting. The only one there was the maid, and her version of what happened leaves me cold. Cal Andres has found out a few interesting things about her, so maybe by tomorrow I'll have something' concrete to tell you. Right now I'm going to hit the hay, so you can hit the road."
At the police station the next morning I sought out Plato Largis. When I walked in the door of his office, he grinned and said, "Bram Geary, ace reporter. What's on your mind, kid?" I was expecting him to explode when he heard that Jack Eddy was poking around in the Stauffer kidnapping. Instead, he sat at his desk, nodding his head as I filled him in. When I was through he said, "He may be right. I'll have your head in a basket if you mention this to anyone else, but I don't think the investigation was handled too well. What he said about imagination, I kind of agree."
I was anxious to find out what progress was being made, so after completing my afternoon rounds I walked north on Main Street to the Wellington office in the Metropolitan Building. I was there so often the cute, blond elevator operator didn't ask what floor I wanted, just took me up to the fifth. Apparently she thought I was another Wellington operative. I didn't mind, even played the role a little.
I had arrived, it turned out, shortly after Cal Andres had ushered the next-door maid into Jack Eddy's office. Jack came out to tell me so and asked if I wanted to sit in on their interrogation. I did, of course, although it turned out to be a little upsetting.
From the first, I had sized up the maid, Gertrude Slade, as somewhat of a dim bulb. She was a stocky woman in her mid twenties, about five three, with oily-looking black hair and eyes set too close together. She was scared out of her wits, what little she had, and neither Jack nor Cal was doing anything to put her at ease.
Before going back into his office Jack had told me that she had an older sister, Florence. The two had shared a cheap apartment above a store on South Arlington Street, although Gertrude spent most of her nights at the house where she worked on Portage Path. Florence was looked upon as reclusive and aloof in the neighborhood. The interesting part, however, was that she had left the day of the kidnapping and hadn't been seen since.
"The police found that out, Jack. I heard about it before."
"Sure. Of course they did, but they let it drop when Gertrude said her sister just happened to leave on vacation that day. Guess they never got around to checking to see if she came back again. She still hasn't."
Once we were in the office, Jack and Cal gave Gertrude a real grilling. "Where's Florence?" was repeated again and again. After hearing "I don't know" a dozen times, Jack said, "You know taking part in a kidnapping is a capital offense. It's called the Lindbergh Law because it was enacted after the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped, and it can get you strapped in the hot seat down at Columbus. You want to risk that, Gert, or do you want to cooperate?"
The woman was at the point of incoherence, totally confused and unsure of what to do. It was obvious that she knew more than she had ever let on, but just as obvious that she was equally afraid of something or someone else, perhaps sister Florence. When it seemed they weren't going to get anywhere with her, Cal said, "Where are you from, Gertie?"
"Gharkeyville/1 she replied, then immediately seemed to regret it. "But I haven't been there in years." After thinking about it for a moment more she added, "Neither has Florence."
"How do you know that?" asked Jack Eddy. "You said you didn't know where she is since she left back in August. Why not Gharkeyville?"
Gertrude was extremely agitated. "No, no, no. She'd never go there. She has to be somewhere else."
"Why wouldn't she go there, Gert? Seems to me like the very place she would go."
She was befuddled, desperate as to what to say next. Finally she croaked, "No, no, no," again. "She can't be in Gharkeyville, so please forget that idea."
Cal Andres looked at Jack and said, "That's where she is, Gharkeyville. No doubt about it, Jack."
Gertrude screamed, "No! No, she isn't! Please, please forget that!"
Even I could tell that Florence was in Gharkeyville. But why did it upset her sister that way? "Because," said Jack Eddy when I asked him later, "she's got the Stauffer kid there."
"You really think so?"
"I'd bet my last dollar on it."
"Where the heck is Gharkeyville?"
"In southwest West Virginia, just a couple of miles from the Kentucky state line. We knew that, by the way, before Cal asked her. Remember that miserable little town of Switchback you went to last spring?"
"How could I forget?"
"Well, from what we've learned, Gharkeyville makes Switchback seem like the Garden of Eden. It's another coal mining town down in Hatfield and McCoy territory. Cal knows a little about it because he grew up in a place like it on the other side of the state line."
"Cal doesn't seem the type. He's so suave and well spoken I'd never have taken him for a hillbilly."
"That's your problem, friend. One of them. You stereotype people, try to fit them into a little niche. Cal has worked hard to become the way he is. Maybe you've never noticed, but he's one hell of an actor. He can play any role you could name, and that's one of the reasons why he's so good at his job. So anyway, have you got any vacation time coming?"
"About five days. Why?" Then the light dawned. "Now wait a minute, Jack . . ."
So we talked about it for a while. "It could be a big story, buddy." Jack said, then a minute later said it again. "Maybe the biggest of your career."
"Not to mention yours. Look, if you think I'm going to spend my vacation time in a place like Gharkeyville—"
"It's up to you, pal. I hear Tom Kennedy at the Beacon Journal is fed up with being scooped on the police beat, so he'd probably jump at the chance to go along."
"You know what you are, Jack? You're an extortionist, an ... an arm twister. You have the mind of a criminal."
He laughed and punched me on the chest. "Of course I do. How else could I be so good at my job?"
"It takes one to know one, isn't that what they say?"
"Know your enemy, buddy. Always know your enemy."
"Dammit, Jack, you've got me over a barrel. So when do you leave?"
"First thing tomorrow morning."
I did my best to work it to my advantage. "Look, Ben," I said to my city editor, "it could break the Stauffer kidnapping wide open. You want me to get first crack at the story, don't you?"
Ben Goldsmith leaned back in his chair, either smirking or sneering, I wasn't sure which. "From what little you've told me, it sounds like another one of your wild-goose chases. But I'll tell you what I'll do. If it turns out you're right, then you've been on company time. Only eight hours a day, though, no overtime. If you're wrong, well, you've been on vacation."
It sounded reasonable. Except that bit about one of my wild-goose chases. Just what was he talking about? I wondered.
It didn't make me happy when Jack said we'd go in my car. "The Auburn would draw too much attention in a place like Gharkeyville," he said. "Chances are the people there have never seen one, but they won't notice another old clunker."
He knew that would get under my skin. The Hupmobile was a far cry from an old clunker. One good thing about taking it, though, was that I'd be behind the wheel. I packed a small suitcase in the morning and was out at the car a few seconds ahead of Jack. After tossing his bag on the backseat, he said, "I'll drive."
We headed due south and made good time to Marietta. We ate lunch there at a downtown diner. When we were settled in a booth where no one could overhear, I said, "You've been holding out on me, Jack. There's more to it than you've told me, isn't there? There has to be, or you wouldn't be driving all the way down to Gharkeyville."
He lifted one eyebrow, then gave a careless shrug, as if to say I was wasting his time. "Nothing important, buddy. Cal Andres found a store that sells secondhand stuff near the sisters' apartment. One day the owner had a little yellow sunsuit in the window. Something for a kid about two. He had seen Florence around the neighborhood, but never with a kid, so he was surprised when she came in and bought it. He showed her a few other things he had for someone that size, and she seemed to enjoy looking over the stuff. Then she suddenly got nervous and hurried out of the place.
"On top of that, Cal saw a woman pushing one of those—what do they call them? Taylor Tots?—with a boy about two in it. He talked to her a while, mentioned Florence, and the woman said she was glad Florence was gone because she scared her."
"Scared her? How?"
"Every time she saw her, Florence made a big fuss over the boy. It got so it was happening so regularly the woman got the idea Florence was lying in wait for her. She felt there was something unnatural about it, and it frightened her."
"Sounds like Florence may have been around the bend."
"You called it for once, buddy. There are women like that, you know. Get obsessed with someone else's kid because they don't have one of their own. There's one more thing. Cal checked the county records and found that Florence had a baby at City Hospital six months after she came to Akron a few years back. It was a boy, stillborn."
And Jack Eddy had said all that was nothing important. Our food arrived and we didn't talk anymore until we finished eating. I thought about what he had told me, of course. I had to agree with that mother, it was kind of scary.
Marietta is a pretty little town on the north bank of the Ohio River, so I wouldn't have minded hanging around for a while. That was out of the question, and we soon were back on the road. Or to be more accurate, a series of them that got progressively worse as we went up, down, and around the precipitous hills that West Virginians call mountains. They might not be the Alps or the Rockies, but driving through them was just as difficult, maybe more so.
After what seemed an eternity we came to a sign telling us we had arrived at Gharkeyville. Like others we had seen along the way, the sign was riddled with bullet holes. I was totally spent, as worn out as if it had been the longest ride of my life. Actually, when I thought about it, it had been the longest ride of my life. I had been to Fort Wayne once and Pittsburgh a couple of times, but fell far short of being a world traveler. I had an ominous feeling that that would change in the next few years, thanks to Adolph Hitler. He claimed that after being handed a large chunk of Czechoslovakia he had no further territorial demands in Europe. The amazing thing was that some people actually believed him.
As promised, Gharkeyville was a dismal little town. Tired as I was, though, it looked okay to me. Best of all was finding that it possessed a hotel, or something that passed for one. I was eager to flop down on a bed and was almost, but not quite, ready to pass up Jack Eddy's offer to buy dinner. The diner a couple of doors down the street was as bad, if not worse than the one in Switchback, where the waitress snarled at customers and the main offering on the menu was a greaseburger. I settled for pork chops, which were a little on the thin side but not too bad, and home fries that had been cremated and were ready for a well-deserved burial.
I awoke refreshed in the morning. For breakfast we found another diner that was a slight cut above the one where we had eaten the previous night. The waitress gave me a quick smile before starting to flirt with Jack. For the umpteenth time I wondered what it was about Jack Eddy that attracted females like flypaper attracts flies. I was taller, better looking, and had a far more pleasing personality, and yet they completely ignored me when Jack was around.
I was eager to hear what he had planned for us to do but wasn't too thrilled when he gave me my orders. I was to drive to the nearby county seat and check various records at the courthouse, a boring assignment. He was just going to nose around a little to see what he could learn. I had a sneaking suspicion that while I would be poring over musty old records, Jack Eddy would be spending time learning more about that waitress.
Most of the things I found in the records seemed of little importance to me. Florence wasn't married when she left home, or at least hadn't been in that county. She was thirty and her sister Gertrude was twenty-six. The elder Slades also had two sons, Anse, who was thirty-two and R. B., twenty-eight. It appeared that the parents and even a couple of grandparents were still alive and living at the family homestead. Aside from the father and one male grandparent, the only one with a criminal record was Anse. His sheet was as long as my arm.
The tax maps were of some interest. The Slades owned a large tract back in the hills a couple of miles from Gharkeyville. If the map was accurate, the land was on a county road, probably dirt, that ended at their property. Isolated as could be.
Jack Eddy was having lunch at the place where we had eaten breakfast when I arrived back in Gharkeyville. A different waitress was on duty, which made me wonder when the other had clocked out and where Jack had been at the time. I showed him the notes I had made, then asked what he had found out.
"Nothing," he said in a disgusted tone. "These people won't talk to an outsider. I didn't want to come right out and ask about the Slades, but subtlety gets you nowhere down here."
I smirked a little and couldn't help saying, "The great Jack Eddy swaggered to the plate and was called out on three pitches."
I thought he was going to slug me, but he managed to contain himself. After a pause that allowed him to regain his equilibrium, he said, "Cal Andres is on his way. Should be here before midnight. Cliff Austin is with him. If you see either one don't act like you recognize them, just walk on by."
"Both of them coming? You must be expecting a war."
"Cal knows how to talk to people around here, we don't. Cliff is just for backup."
We sat quietly for a few minutes. If we needed backup it did indeed sound like Jack was expecting serious trouble. I had a disquieting thought. "Jack, Anse Slade shot some guy about the time Florence headed up to Akron. Maybe it was the one that got her pregnant. Anyway, the fellow didn't die, so Anse got six months, suspended."
"I'm not sure that shooting someone is a serious offense in these parts."
"Another thing, Jack. A while back I read a book called Battle Cry that was set somewhere around here, and it had a couple of characters named Anse. One was Bad Anse. Did you ever hear of anyone named Anse before we came down here?"
Jack leaned his head back and laughed. "God, but you have a way of hitting on the trivial, friend."
I was bored out of my mind until the middle of the next morning when I saw Cal Andres. He was wearing a worn pair of bib overalls, a tattered flannel shirt, and was leaning up against a post on Main Street whittling a stick of wood with a nasty-looking knife. Several other men were nearby doing pretty much the same thing. It seemed to be a major pastime in Gharkeyville. How could people stand to live that way? I wondered. I would have been willing to bet that not a single one of them, Cal excluded, had ever heard of Hitler, let alone Czechoslovakia.
There was a weekly newspaper, though. It ran obits on the front page along with admissions to the hospital at the county seat. Releases, too, of those who hadn't moved over to the obituary column. There were the expected chicken dinner reports from the various towns and villages in the vicinity so you could keep up to date on who visited whom the past week. If you checked closely you could find that some people ate at the expense of their friends five or six nights a week. Also which single males and single females seemed to always show up at the same house at suppertime.
So social activity in the county appeared brisk. Privacy, at least with a large segment of the population, was not sought after, especially at mealtime. The Gharkeyville Gazette contained some church news, a few stories concerning coal mines or a store opening or closing, but not a word on national or world events.
I searched in vain for a paper from a larger city. The man behind the counter at a variety store said they received the paper from Charleston but were sold out. "How many copies do you get?"
"Two. One of 'em's reserved for Doc Singletary."
"Then you actually sell one copy?"
"Yup." That ended the conversation.
The news on the radio station at the county seat was more of the same, obits and hospital admissions and releases. Closed in by the surrounding hills, cut off from the outside world, it could have been medieval times rather than 1938. Aside from the decrepit cars and trucks on the street, of course.
Flat caps were part of the uniform for the males of Gharkeyville, although a few broke ranks by wearing battered fedoras that made my old one look pretty good. The youths that weren't wearing flat caps wore those little beanies made from the crown of an old fedora with the bottom turned up and scalloped. The women were nearly all clad in shapeless print housedresses, and most of the young girls wore dresses made from patterned flour sacks, also shapeless. Occasionally I saw an overweight woman, but most of them, like the men, were thin and had drawn, pinched faces. Depression faces, a sign of the times seen everywhere, but more pronounced in Gharkeyville.
It was late evening before we had a council of war in Jack's room at the hotel. Cal Andres did most of the talking. He had wormed his way into the trust of a few people that took him for one of their own. Cal was an enigma. In a suit and tie he could pass for a successful businessman or a rubber company junior executive and was able to mingle at will with those types. In bib overalls and a flat cap he was perfectly at home on the streets of Gharkeyville. He wasn't a big man, no more than five nine, but he worked out at a gym almost daily, so he was wiry and strong as a bull. Before coming to Gharkeyville he had shaved off the slim, Clark Gable-style mustache and mussed up the slicked-back dark hair that gave him the appearance of a Latin romancer. He could stand out in a crowd or lose himself completely in one, whatever suited the occasion. In a sense, he was a human chameleon, an ideal private eye.
"The Slades could be dangerous, Jack," he said. "They run a big still on their property, and the sheriff and the revenuers leave them alone. They peddle their moonshine over a large area, but from what I heard, most of the buyers pick the stuff up themselves. Nobody came right out and said he was afraid of the Slades, but I could tell that people give them a wide berth, especially Anse. He doesn't run the moonshine business, the father does that, but he's the strongman of the operation. Back home we'd call him an enforcer for the mob. Oh, and one more thing, Anse has a brown panel truck.
"The other son, R. B., is regarded as a pretty nice fellow. As for Florence, she's looked on as a little 'tetched’ as they say down here. Now here's the interesting part: She showed up a couple of months ago with a kid, a boy about two she claims she had while up north. The husband she had married up there had died, or so she told everybody. We know that was a lie. For a week or two she was showing the kid off around town. Since then she hasn't been seen."
Jack Eddy shook his head for a moment, then gave a curt laugh. "I think I get the whole picture now. It's about like we figured, this Florence was nuts to have a kid. One day she was visiting her sister Gertrude on Portage Path and got a look at the Stauffer boy. He was the one, none other would do. It was easy to talk Gertrude into going along with her plan, and she managed to recruit Anse for the job. From the sound of him that wasn't too difficult.
"It worked to perfection until it was Gertrude's time to play her role. She's incredibly stupid, so when she talked to the police about seeing the panel truck she got all flustered, and when asked to describe it she could only remember her brother's truck. It was probably supposed to be black or red, but she said brown. Then she managed to recover enough to tell about the fake lettering. Next she had the job of mailing the ransom letters. I never would have believed it possible, but she was dumb enough to get the wrong address on the envelopes. Florence must have written the second letter and left it with Gertrude to mail later.
"In the meantime, Anse, Florence, and the kid were either back in Gharkeyville or well on their way. None of them are what you would call heavy on the gray matter, and yet they managed to pull off a pretty decent snatch, one they almost got away with. They let Florence run loose with the kid for a couple of weeks, but something happened, and now they've got her tucked away at home. The question is how do we get the boy and Florence away from that mountain hideout and back to Akron. The cops can take care of picking up Anse. And I don't mean the local cops. Whatever, he's none of our concern except for dealing with him when we pick up Florence and the kid."
Cliff Austin said, "It won't be easy, Jack. I used Bram's little sketch and drove up there in Cal's car this afternoon. Man, talk about isolated. The way I see it, we'll have to approach on foot and by going through the woods. There's a Y in the road about half a mile away. We can have Bram park his car there because we'll need one and then give him a signal or a time when he should drive up to the house."
I didn't like the sound of that one bit.
"And we have to remember," said Cal Andres, "that these are hill people. The men will all have guns. That means four of them. Chances are that Anse is the only one that knows Florence's story is phony, so the others will think that we're the kidnappers. Like Cliff said, it won't be easy."
Again, Jack Eddy's laugh was curt. "Since when did any of us look for easy jobs?"
If it hadn't been for foolish manly pride, not to mention embarrassment, I would have raised my hand and shouted, "Me!"
The next day was the shortest of my life. The hands on the clock just seemed to whirl around out of control, and all too soon it was evening. We checked out of the hotel, left Cal's car parked along the street leading out of town, then the four of us drove in my car to the dirt road leading to the Slade homestead. As planned, I was to wait at the point where the road forked off to the left; the other three took off on foot. The signal for me to pick them up would be gunfire. That was a comforting thought as I began my lonely vigil.
It was only later that I learned what transpired when they reached the house. Cal Andres did a bit of stealthy window peeping and found the entire family, including the Stauffer boy, gathered in the living room listening to a program on radio. Cal and Jack Eddy moved to the rear of the house, Cliff Austin to the front.
The fun began with Cliff firing two shots in the air. Anse Slade, who was carrying a pistol in his jacket, rushed out the front door as Jack and Cal charged in the back. Cliff leveled Anse Slade with a bullet in the leg. Cal stopped R.B. and the two older men from reaching the rack holding their rifles. Jack swooped up the kid in one arm and Florence in the other. All the women were screaming their heads off.
I came careening up the rutted drive within seconds after Cal and Jack came out of the front door. Everyone piled into my car. Florence was still screaming and trying to put up a fight. As we roared off back down the drive, someone at the house began firing. I gave the Hupmobile a little more gas when I heard a bullet ping off its back end.
Then we were in the clear. "They'll be after us, Jack," I yelled.
Jack, Cal, and Cliff laughed. "Not until they hike somewhere to get a vehicle," Jack said. "Cliff has the distributor caps off the two back there at the house."
We dropped off Cal and Cliff at the other car, then headed north as fast as the hills would allow. Cal's car, a souped-up 1935 Buick, was close behind. It was tricky enough driving those narrow, winding roads with daylight making the curves and other hazards visible. At night it was tortuous. Jack was in the backseat with Florence. Her right hand was cuffed to the armrest, her left to Jack Eddy. The child was asleep on the seat to his left.
At Jack's orders we didn't take the most direct route, the one we had followed on the way down. Florence began keening as soon as we were on the open road. It was the fearful cry of an agonized banshee. After fifteen minutes of it, Jack stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth.
I breathed a sigh of relief when a little before first light we crossed the Ohio River on the Silver Bridge at Gallipolis. We were still in hilly country, but it wasn't anything like that around Gharkeyville. Near Logan we pulled up at a roadside diner and parked well away from the other cars and pickup trucks. Cal Andres pulled his Buick up beside us, and he and Cliff went inside. A short time later they came back with food for the rest of us. Florence refused to eat, which didn't come as a shock.
In the meantime, I had checked the rear of my car and found a bullet hole in the left fender. Fortunately it was above the level of the tire or anything else of importance. Just seeing it, though, made me even more aware of how easily our adventure could have ended in disaster. With a disabled car, armed men in pursuit, and two miles from town, what would we have done? I didn't even want to think about it.
Jack Eddy made a call from a phone booth on the outskirts of Canton, and half an hour later we saw the Akron city limit sign. I did as ordered and stopped in front of the downtown police station. Cal parked right behind us. Jack and Cal got the handcuffs off Florence, and then Cliff Austin frog-marched her inside. The few people on the sidewalk stood gawking as over and over she screamed, "Give me back my baby!"
Fifteen minutes later we pulled into the Stauffers' driveway. Jack Eddy had called the house from the police station, so both of them were waiting outside for us. Joanne began crying as soon as she had the boy in her arms. Jack gave her husband a brief summary of what had happened, then we both got a kiss from Joanne before we headed back downtown.
The only way for the Times-Press to beat the Beacon Journal was to put out an extra. It was a big enough event to warrant one, and my story created a sensation throughout the city. Only it wasn't actually my story. Ben Goldsmith had a rewrite man handle it with me feeding him the details. I was mentioned only as "a Times-Press reporter." Goldsmith said, "We're not having another first-person story with you coming out the hero." I didn't really care but was a little put out that I didn't even get to share the byline. Uppermost in my mind was getting home to the boardinghouse and falling into a deep, well-earned sleep.
And thus it ended, or so I thought. Goldsmith had given me the next day off, as he should have, and I decided to spend it doing nothing but loafing around home. The weather had warmed up nicely, so I was relaxing on the front porch swing enjoying the escapades of Perry Mason in the latest Earle Stanley Gardner novel until Mrs. Bauer called me to the telephone. It was Jack Eddy on the line with a curt message, "Get down here, buddy, pronto."
I did, but reluctantly and grudgingly. Ben Goldsmith was my boss, so I didn't mind taking orders from him, but those coming from Jack Eddy were getting a little annoying. I lingered on the elevator at the Metropolitan Building, though, and made a date for the next night with the cute operator.
I was surprised to find Gertrude Slade coming out of Jack Eddy's office. Mac McKelvey was gripping her arm as he escorted her to another room down the hall. "We've had her stashed away next door at the Howe Hotel," Jack told me. "One of our female operatives was in the room with her, and Mac and another man rotated on keeping watch in the hall outside."
Before I could ask why, Cliff Austin came in prodding Prudence Longfellow, the Stauffers' nanny, toward us. She appeared angry, but it was just a facade. In reality you could see she was frightened half out of her mind. Jack wasn't gentle with her. After sitting her down in a chair, he said, "The jig's up, Prude, so let's not waste time. We know all about it, so come clean and have it over with."
She tried to brazen it out, but her voice was quivering as she said, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Have it your way, kiddo." He picked up his phone. After a few seconds he said, "Bring her in."
When half a minute later Gertrude Slade was brought into the room, Prudence Longfellow blanched and gave a little gasp. "It's all over, Prude," said Jack, "so let's hear it in your own words."
Prudence knew he was right as soon as she saw Gertrude, the erstwhile next-door maid. She began crying. In a teary, choked-up voice she began, "I was coerced into going along with it by that horrible woman."
"Florence Slade?"
She nodded her head, wiped away the tears on her cheeks, blew her nose, and continued, "She found out about something in my past. I'm not going to tell you what it was, but she said if I didn't help them she would tell the Stauffers and then see that I never got another job."
The gist of the matter was that Prudence had just handed the boy to Gertrude and then hurried into the house, pretending she had to use the bathroom, making sure the Stauffers' maid saw her. Gertrude in turn said that she gave the child to Florence, who had been waiting. Anse Slade was there as well. He and Florence drove away in his car with the boy on Florence's lap. They headed straight for Gharkeyville.
"And it was Anse who took the money from you on Seiberling Street, then gave you a light tap on the head," Jack Eddy said to Prudence. "You were lucky he didn't kill you so they wouldn't have had to split the ransom with you."
Prudence nodded her head. "I only got a third of the ransom. How did you find out about it?"
"I did some checking on you," said Cliff Austin. "The first thing that seemed odd was that you moved into a more expensive apartment even though you were out of a job for the time being. When I found out you had bought a used car, that was the clincher in my book. I dug a little deeper and learned what it was that Florence held over your head to make you cooperate. It wasn't that big a deal, lady. You should have told her to get lost."
So now it really was all over. It gave me another good story, of course, but I was sick of the whole affair. The four participants were headed for lengthy stays in Federal prisons, but someone else could handle those stories.
My date with the elevator operator, Gail Robinson, didn't turn out too good. She was cute as could be, pleasant too, but she didn't have much upstairs except the blond curls on top of her head. To say the conversation lagged at times would be an understatement.
My heart, I had to admit to myself, belonged to my old girlfriend, Sue Baney. For months now she wouldn't talk to me, just banged down the phone as soon as she heard my voice until I quit even trying to call. It was Jack Eddy's fault, or so it seemed to me, because Sue had given up on me when I had tagged along on another of his cases that involved shooting. She didn't want a dead boyfriend, she said. I had to laugh ruefully when I thought of what she would say if she knew that my car now sported a bullet hole.
I wanted to forget the Stauffer-Slade case, but it kept popping up in my mind. So many lives ruined, so much worry and despair, all because a mentally unstable woman was fixated on having a child to replace her own that was stillborn. And not just any child, only the Stauffer boy would do. I took up my old habit of walking the streets of East Akron at night. I was looking for answers, I suppose, but didn't find any along the empty streets or by staring at the same old displays in the windows of locked stores. The world wasn't a pretty place, but it was foolish of me to think I could do anything to make it better. Even so I wanted to.
I was surprised when I walked into Kippy's at lunchtime one day and saw Sue Baney seated at the counter. I was even more surprised a few minutes later when she came over and stood by my stool. I looked around, opened my mouth, but found I was tongue-tied. Sue hesitated a moment, then cleared her throat before saying, "I just want to say that it was heroic of you to do what you did in rescuing that kidnapped little boy, Bram."
I cleared my throat, too, and croaked, "You read about it in the paper?"
"Yes, and Jack Eddy called me to elaborate on the part you played. He said you were the key to the success of the whole operation."
That was so like him. Jack Eddy didn't hesitate to involve me in something that might easily get me killed and then turn around and make it seem that I was the hero. And to phone my estranged girlfriend in hope of getting us back together.
Sue turned and walked toward the door, then looked back and said, "Call me sometime ... if you feel like it."
My heart leaped up to my throat. I watched her walk away, admiring her trim little body and the swaying of her hips. When she was gone I checked my watch. It was going on one o'clock, so I would have to wait six more hours before picking up the phone.
