I hurried back to the phone and got Tom Daly. “It’s him!” I said.
“He’s been identified?”
“No, but looking at the body, I got a hunch.”
His voice dropped. “Look, kid, tell me now, just tell me what you know for sure.”
“For one thing, he’s a Jewish kid,” I said. “Anyway, he’s circumcised.”
I could feel, in his instant hesitation, the stoppage people always had before things Jewish. He was weighing, then crediting me with somehow knowing.
“What about the kid’s glasses? Kessler said his boy didn’t wear any.”
“They’re not his. They don’t fit him. Listen. They must be the murderer’s. He must have dropped them. Listen. He’s got bruises on his head—”
“Wait, wait!” I heard him yelling my news to Reese. Then: “Stay there. I’ll call the Kesslers to come and identify him.”
It was even said afterward that but for my going out there just then, the murderers might never have been caught. It’s not a question of credit; indeed it has always bothered me that I received a kind of notoriety, a kind of advantage out of the case. Obviously what I did that morning was only an errand, and if I hadn’t gone there, the identification would have been made in some other way, perhaps a day later. True, the ransom money might in the meantime have been paid, but the money was quite an insignificant item in the overwhelming puzzle of human behavior that was to be uncovered.
In any case, the journalistic credit should have gone, not to me, but to Reese for connecting the two items on his desk. And the discovery goes back after all to the steelworker who walked across the wasteland and happened to see a flash of white in some weeds—the boy’s foot.
There was much moralizing to come; providence was mentioned. I believe I have grown beyond the cynical pose of the twenties; I would not argue today that all existence is the random result of blind motion.
It did happen that Peter Wrotzlaw, a steel-mill worker who usually went to his job by another path, deviated that one morning to pick up his watch from a repairman. He cut across the Hegewisch wasteland. At 118th Street there was a marshy area, a pond, with the water draining through a culvert under a railway embankment. Wrotzlaw mounted this embankment to cross the pond, and then he noticed the flash of white at the opening of the drainpipe.
It was even said to be providential that Wrotzlaw had once lived on a farm, for in a submerged way his nature sense knew something strange was there, neither animal nor fish. He climbed down and, parting the weeds, recognized a boy’s foot. Bending low, he made out the whole body, crammed into the cement pipe.
Just then, up on the tracks, a handcar appeared. Wrotzlaw shouted. The two railway workers stopped their car and came down. One spoke Polish.
“Here, look!” Wrotzlaw explained. “Just this minute, I saw something white. I found this!”
The railwaymen were wearing boots. The Polish one stepped into the water; it came just to his knees. He took hold and pulled out the body of the boy; he carried it to the water’s edge and put it down, the face turned to the gray, misty morning sky. “Is drowned. Poor kiddo.”
How could the boy have got into the culvert? Maybe foolish kids, trying to play a game, crawl through the pipe. And this one got stuck and drowned.
A kid of someone. A pity. “You ever seen him around here?”
The two railroad men lifted the body to carry it up to their handcar. But then they asked, “Where are his clothes?”
Wrotzlaw searched in the weeds. “Hey!” He picked up the pair of glasses, glinting there, and placed them on the boy. He searched farther along the downtrodden grass. “Stocking.”
He held it up, a knee-pants stocking, a good one, new, not like the black cotton stockings of the neighborhood kids, with mended holes at the knees.
But no other clothing could be found. “Other kids maybe got scared, ran away, took everything.” Now the railway men said Wrotzlaw should come with them, to bring the body back to their railway yard. He would be late for his job, he protested, but the other Pole insisted, “You found him, you come with us.” So he climbed up. “Poor kid, he’s got drowned.”
By the freight platform, men gathered. The yard boss called the police. A patrol wagon removed the corpse. “Unknown boy, drowned” was marked on the blotter, and the body was sent to Swaboda’s.
Tom Daly called Kessler. Almost before Tom could hear it ring, the phone was picked up. “Yes? Yes?”
“This is the Globe.”
“Please. We are expecting an important message. Please don’t call this number. Please leave the line clear.”
“But our reporter believes he has identified your boy, Mr. Kessler.”
Charles Kessler had been sitting with his hand ready to the phone, waiting for the call promised in the special-delivery letter. He was a small-made man, always keeping himself neat and correct-looking. His chair was high-backed and carved, one of the ornate throne-chairs common in those days. In his solid house with his solid furniture it seemed an impossible thing that a kidnaping should have happened to him.
He had always dealt with everyone to the penny, exact. Even when he had been a pawnbroker, long years ago, he had been proud of his reputation for honesty and exactitude, ninety-five cents on the dollar. In Chicago’s wide-open days, when elaborate gambling salons had studded the downtown area, he had kept his elegant little pawn office open far into the night to accommodate the princelings of the first great Chicago meat and wheat fortunes, who would pledge their diamond studs in order to go on with a game. It was thirty years since he had gone out of the loan business into real estate, but could this crime be some long-nurtured, crazed act of revenge for a fancied wrong?
A man accustomed to dealing correctly and exactly in mortgage notes and debentures, how could he deal with a ransom letter? He wanted to deal with it precisely, not to deviate, not to take any risk. The letter lay there on the mahogany table, unfolded. It said he must keep the telephone line clear—a call would come.
The letter itself proved that the kidnaping was real and not some crazy joke, as he had hoped it might be when he had come back from searching the school building last night—he and Judge Wagner—to find his wife sitting dazed by the phone. “Someone—a man. He said, Kidnaped, instructions in the morning. He said a name. I don’t know. A name . . .”
A joke? Paulie was not a boy to play such jokes. Maybe some of his schoolmates? Or should the police be called? An alarm be sent out?
Judge Wagner, a wise man, a man with connections, said, Wait. A big alarm might prove dangerous for Paulie—if it was really a kidnaping. Then all night long they had tried on the phone to reach important people—the chief of detectives, the mayor, the state’s attorney.
And early in the morning, Kessler himself had run to the door to answer the bell. A special-delivery letter. A name, Harold Williams. No use trying to recall anyone with such a name; it was surely a fake. “But why me?” All morning long Charles Kessler kept asking this of his friend Judge Wagner, of his brother Jonas. “Why me? I never hurt anybody. Why me?” And: “Who would do such a thing? Who? To a decent honest man, to a poor innocent woman, the boy’s mother . . .”
There lay the letter. It was typewritten.
Dear Sir:
As you no doubt know by this time your son has been kidnapped. Allow us to assure you that he is at present well and safe. You need fear no physical harm for him provided you live up carefully to the following instructions, and such others as you will receive by future communications. Should you, however, disobey any of our instructions even slightly, his death will be the penalty.