STOLEN AWAY
A Nathan Heller Novel
The Memoirs of Nathan Heller
STOLEN AWAY
A Nathan Heller Novel
MAX ALLAN COLLINS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright ©2011 Max Allan Collins
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by AmazonEncore
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN: 978-1-61218-090-8
FOR LYNN MYERS, JR.
A.K.A. SAM—
MY EAST-COAST LEGMAN
“I was so fed up with this hero stuff,
I could have shouted murder.”
—Charles A. Lindbergh
“Fame is a kind of death.”
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“There are, indeed, societies for prevention of cruelty to animals, but, unfortunately, not for men.”
—Bruno Richard Hauptmann
Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
1 THE LONE EAGLE
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
2 INTERIM
Chapter 25
3 THE LONE WOLF
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
EPILOGUE
Chapter 42
I OWE THEM ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
MARCH 4, 1932
1
The buxom blonde stepped down off the little silver metal stairs of the train with a baby bundled in her arms and a worried expression on her pretty, pockmarked face. A porter helped her by the fur-trimmed arm of her tan fur-collared coat, providing a wooden stool where the final step ought to have been, and she gave him a flickering smile of thanks before trundling away from the Twentieth Century Limited, the sleek streamliner that had whisked her here from New York.
Natural for a mother to be protective of her child—particularly right now, with the papers full of what was already touted as the “Crime of the Century”: the kidnapping, night before last, of the Lindbergh kid from his sheltered nursery in a country home in the wilds of New Jersey.
Why the hell that should make a mother nervous in Chicago, Illinois, went beyond logic, but not beyond human nature, which of course has not a damn thing to do with logic. What mother wouldn’t identify with the unlucky Lindys? What mother wouldn’t read those horrible headlines and hear those hysterical radio commentators and not clutch her sweet infant closer to her bosom, which in this case was an enviable place to get clutched.
The catch was: I didn’t figure she was the kid’s mother.
As a matter of fact, I was ready to lay odds that this was Lindy, Jr., himself, and not her own precious little flesh and blood.
Only not so little: the child was big for a babe in arms—the Lindbergh child was, after all, twenty months old. And this kid was wearing Dr. Denton’s—like Little Lindy when he got yanked from his crib—and was wrapped up in blankets, rather than the snowsuit and cap you’d expect for a toddler.
True, I’d spotted dark curly hair on the child, rather than the missing boy’s famous blond locks. But, hell—I didn’t buy the dame’s hair color, either.
I was sitting on one of three chairs at an unenclosed shoeshine stand against the wall facing the tracks in the train shed of LaSalle Street Station. This particular chair was damn near home to me when I pulled duty here; the shoeshine boy, Cletus, a lad of seventy or so, didn’t mind—as long as I got up and wandered off and let him make a living, when the station got busy.
