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.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“This is Gladys Davis,” Mrs. Cayce said.
The blonde smiled at me and I smiled right back. She was carrying a steno pad, I noticed. So the clairvoyant had a dishy dame for a secretary. Now I was starting to feel at home.
“Miss Davis has been our secretary since 1923,” Mrs. Cayce explained. “Her older sister was in our Christian study group.”
Praise Jesus.
“What do we need to do?” Breckinridge asked Mrs. Cayce.
“Nothing, dear,” she said, touching the lawyer’s hand. “You and Mr. Heller just sit quietly and watch. It would help if you would use our initial moments of meditation to turn your own thoughts inward.”
That was me. I was one reflective son of a bitch.
Miss Davis settled her sweet frame into the schoolboy desk chair near the couch, where Cayce had stretched out, his hands on his forehead, palms up; what was he going to do, wiggle his fingers and pretend he was a bunny rabbit?
Gertrude Cayce took the chair near her husband’s head. He looked at her lovingly, and she looked at him the same way, and stroked his cheek lightly. It was a moment between them that seemed very real to me-suddenly the dishy secretary seemed just a secretary.
He closed his eyes, slowly moved his hands down from his forehead until his palms were flat against his stomach. He began breathing deeply, rhythmically.
Then the secretary and the wife bowed their heads and began to pray or meditate or something. This was our cue to turn our own thoughts inward, I supposed. Breckinridge looked at me blankly and I shrugged and he shrugged, and we looked toward the now apparently slumbering Cayce.
He sighed deeply. Then his breathing became light and soft, as if he were taking a quiet nap.
Mrs. Cayce repeated something, which Breckinridge and I could not hear, but took to be the hypnotic suggestion that would trigger the “reading.”
I got out my pencil and notebook; what the hell-I was here.
Cayce began to mumble. He seemed to be repeating his wife’s incantation.
Then he damn near shouted, and both Breckinridge and I jumped, a little, in our hardwood chairs. Tough on the tailbone.
“Can you give us the exact location of the missing child,” Mrs. Cayce asked him gently, “at the present hour-and can you describe the surest way to restore the child unharmed to his parents?”
“There are many channels through which contacting may be done,” he said, in a clear, normal voice. “These are the channels that are acquainted best with the nature of racketeering. These individuals are part new, partly not new to such rackets-see? That is, one who has been in the employ of such-the others, entirely new.”
In that gibberish, it struck me, was what might be a grain of truth: experienced racketeers working with somebody recruited from the inside at the Lindbergh house.
Mrs. Cayce tried again. “What means should be used to communicate with the kidnappers?”
“There are already many in motion. Someone who may make arrangements or agreements, for the release or return without injury to the baby, would be best.”
That was brilliant.
“Is it possible to get the names of these people?”
“The leader of authority of the group is Maglio.”
Maglio? I knew of a Maglio: Paul Maglio, sometimes known as Paul Ricca, one of Capone’s cronies! I wrote the name down. I underlined it three times.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Cayce,” I said, softly. Worried I might spoil things by interrupting.
But she only looked back with a gentle, Madonna-like smile. “Yes, Mr. Heller?”
“Would it be possible for me to ask Mr. Cayce a few questions?”
Without hesitation, she said, “Certainly,” and rose from the chair and gestured me toward it.
Hating myself for getting sucked into this swami’s act, I went to the chair and sat.
“Can you tell me about the kidnapping itself?” I asked. “How did it happen?”
“The baby was removed from the room, about eight-thirty P.M., carried by a man,” he said. “Another man was waiting below.”
I didn’t want to prompt him unduly, so I just said, “Below?”
Cayce nodded; his eyes remained closed. He looked peacefully asleep. “The child was lowered to the ground and taken to a car. Now we find there are changes in the manner of transportation….”
That did make sense, of course; changing cars made sense, But you didn’t have to be psychic to figure that one out.
“Another car is used,” he said. “They moved northward, toward Jersey City, through a tunnel and across New York City into Connecticut, into the region of Cordova.”
I was writing this stuff down; God knew why, but I was.
“On the east side of New Haven,” he said, “following a route along Adams Street, they took the child to a two-story shingled house, numbered Seventy-Three. Two tenths of a mile from the end of Adams Street is a brown house, formerly painted green, the third house from the corner. There is red dirt on the pavement. The child is in a house on Scharten Street.”
I felt like a fool, writing this prattle down, but part of me was caught up in it. Cayce, like any good faker, had a certain presence.
“Is the baby still at this address?”
“Yes.”
Breckinridge was standing, next to me, now. He said to Cayce, “Was Red Johnson involved?”
“Involved, as seen.”
“Was the nurse, Betty Gow, involved?”
“Not directly.”
“Who else?”
“A woman named Belliance.”
That name rang no bells with me.
I took over for Breckinridge. “Who guards the baby now?”
“The woman and two men who are now at home.”
“Where?”
“Follow my instructions,” he said testily, “and you will be led to the child.”
“I know New Haven well,” Breckinridge said. “I’ve never heard of Cordova. Can you tell us through what channels Scharten Street might be located?”
“By going to the street! If the name’s on it, that’s a right good mark!”
Breckinridge looked at me with wide eyes and I shrugged.
“Follow my instructions and you will find the child. We are through.”
“Where…” Breckinridge began, but Mrs. Cayce gently moved between him and Cayce. She was shaking her head, no, raising a palm to us both, in a stop motion.
She bent forward over her husband and murmured something, to bring him out of it.
A few moments later, Cayce drew a long, deep breath and his eyes popped open. He sat up. He yawned, stretching his arms.
“Did you get everything down?” he asked his secretary.
Miss Davis bobbled her pretty blonde head.
He stood. With utter certainty, he said to Breckinridge, “Follow what you heard-whatever it was I said-and you’ll get that child back.”
Dazed, Breckinridge said, “Well…thank you. We’ll follow up on everything we heard here, today.”
Cayce beamed, patted Breckinridge on the shoulder. “Splendid. My secretary will send you a carbon of the transcription. Do let me know how it comes out. We like to follow up on these things.”
He might have been talking about some kid’s cough he prescribed a poultice for.
“What do we owe you, Mr. Cayce?” Breckinridge said.
Here it comes, I thought. Here it finally comes.
“We normally charge twenty dollars for a reading,” he said. “I wish it weren’t necessary to charge at all.”
Twenty bucks? That was chicken feed for a racket like this.
“But in this case,” Cayce said somberly, “I will make an exception.”
Ah! Now comes the sting-he knows he’s dealing with dough-Lindbergh and Breckinridge and Anne Lindbergh’s wealthy family, the Morrows….
“Pay me nothing,” he said. “And please, as to the press…”
That was it, then-he wanted the publicity.
He waggled a finger, like a schoolteacher. “Not a word to them. I don’t want the notoriety. I don’t want to be involved in criminal cases again. Much too unpleasant.”
I felt like I’d been whacked by a psychic two-by-four. With a mystic nail in it.
Mrs. Cayce served us supper in her cozy kitchen, before we left; it was pot roast and potatoes and carrots, much like the meal at the Lindberghs-only the meat was tender and the side dishes delicious, in the best country manner.
“Some day you gentlemen will have to have life readings,” Cayce said, helping himself to a heaping portion of mashed potatoes. “Would you be interested in who and what you were in a former life?”
“Reincarnation, Mr. Cayce?” Breckinridge smiled. “I thought you were a Christian.”
“There is nothing in the Bible to refute reincarnation,” he said. “Although I can do a reading on Mr. Heller without going to sleep.”
“Oh, really?” I said, lifting a fork of food. “What was I in my previous life?”
“An idealist,” he said, blue-gray eyes sparkling. “All cynics were idealists, once. More pot roast, Mr. Heller?”
In the Dusenberg, I asked Breckinridge what he’d made of all that.
“I’ll be damned if I know,” he admitted. “And you?”
“I’ll be damned if I know, either. I won’t say I’m convinced, but I will say I want to track everything he gave us.”
“A street map of New Haven would be a start. We might be able to get one of those at a gas station, on the way back.”
“Good idea. You know, the first of the two Italian names he mentioned-Maglio-is the name of one of Capone’s top lieutenants.”
Breckinridge gave me a sharp look. “Interesting. And he indicated Red Johnson was involved.”
Betty Gow’s sailor.
“Aren’t we supposed to get a shot at questioning that guy?” I asked.
Breckinridge nodded. “Tomorrow.”
“Do you think he’s a good suspect?”
“Colonel Lindbergh doesn’t like to think his servants might be involved, even indirectly…but after what the Hartford police found in Johnson’s car, I’d say he’s an excellent suspect.”
“What did they find in his car?”
Breckinridge turned his attention from the road to show me a raised eyebrow.
“An empty milk bottle,” he said.