Black Cat Weekly #46

Chapter 7

byDixie’s voice was warm with approval. “I think it’s a perfectly lovely idea!”

“Thank you, my dear,” I replied modestly. “If I say so myself, it does seem foolproof. And extremely simple.”

“Except,” she said, “I don’t like the bit about the baby, Professor.” She calls me “Professor” because I once attended Dartmouth briefly and, in consequence, express myself with rather more formality than my associates.

I said, “What don’t you like about the baby bit, as you call it?”

“It’s k********g, isn’t it?”

Attempting to set her fears at rest (I shan’t call them scruples, since Dixie is burdened with no more of these uncomfortable commodities than I am), I said, “k********g? Not at all, Dixie. To constitute a k********g in the true sense, there must be a fairly lengthy a*******n—with kidnap notes, ransom demands, go-betweens, police, and all the rest of it. In our case we shall be simply borrowing a baby for a few minutes, no more than half an hour at most. The baby will be found, almost at once, alive and unharmed. And quite possibly nobody will even realize the baby was borrowed until it is safe home again. That is how I visualize the baby bit, Dixie. So in my judgment you need not concern yourself about kidnapping.”

borrowing“Okay, Professor,” Dixie said. “Your judgment has always been good enough for me.” The dear girl! “Where do we find a baby?”

“I thought perhaps you might have a suggestion as to that?” Dixie’s pretty mouth stretched into her teasing smile. “I know a few girls who have babies, yes. But in order to borrow one we’d have to cut them in on the deal. And you don’t want that, do you?”

I said with dignity, “I prefer our project to involve as few individuals as possible, Dixie, that is true. For safety’s sake, however, rather than from any stinginess on my part—”

She interrupted me, still teasing. “In that case, Professor, I expect that for a modest fee I could borrow little Elinor from Jackie over there.” She jerked a thumb at the cocktail waitress who had but recently served us our drinks at the tiny table we occupied in the Elite Lounge.

“Please be serious, Dixie. We can’t borrow a baby from somebody we know. Such an act of folly would later lead the police inexorably to us, can’t you see that? No, what I am asking you is, where can we borrow an anonymous baby, if you see what I mean?”

anonymousThis time she gave my question her serious attention. Her forehead wrinkled in thought. After a moment she said, “Two possibilities I can think of offhand.”

“Two?”

“Gladstone Park, for one, Professor. In the center of town where the mothers and the nursemaids air their babies every nice day. There are dozens of them.”

I shook my head in a decided negative. “Their surveillance is too close and constant to yield us an opportunity of borrowing one of their charges.”

“Okay, then. The Forest Avenue Day Care Center. About a hundred kids are parked there every day by parents who have jobs.”

“How wise I was to come to you for help in this enterprise, Dixie!” I said. “The Forest Avenue Day Care Center is an inspiration! Do you know anything about the operation of the place?”

“I know all about it, at least from the outside. My apartment is right across the street.”

“So?”

“So at ten thirty in the morning on nice days all the kids are let out into the yard for a play period—on the swings and jungle gyms and so on. And the little ones—the babies—are slapped into outdoor playpens for the period, sometimes two or three babies to each pen.”

“And watched carefully?”

“Not so carefully that I couldn’t sneak through the hedge and borrow one if I wanted to. Easiest thing in the world.”

“And the baby wouldn’t be missed immediately?”

“Not likely. Not until they count noses at the end of the play period. I’ve seen them doing it. The staff uses the play period as a partial coffee break of their own.”

“Excellent,” I said with satisfaction. “Now then. What kind of baby conveyance would you suggest?”

“A stroller,” she answered without hesitation. “It’s more compact than a fancy perambulator, displays the child more effectively, and is easier to get into a station wagon.”

I nodded in agreement.

“So what we’ll want,” said Dixie, “is a kid about ten or eleven months old, right? Big enough to sit up in a stroller, but not big enough to be walking around by himself.”

“Exactly. And Dixie, I suggest that you wear your wig and a pair of those large sunglasses.”

“And a scarf around my wig,” she said, “and I’ll guarantee you’ll never recognize me, Professor.”

I smiled at her. “Good. Next question. Which establishment shall we honor with our patronage?”

“Harding’s,” she said at once. “Who else? It’s the best in town. And their ad in the newspaper announcing the Special of the Week will tell me what to ask for.”

I felt more and more pleased with Dixie. She is an invaluable ally. Usually I need only present her with the mere outline of a workable idea and she begins at once to flesh out my general concept with specific detail.

Her eyes gleamed with excitement now. “Last week’s Special would have been a dandy. As the ad said, it would have been a steal”—she twinkled at me—”for seventeen thousand bucks.”

“Don’t fret, Dixie,” I comforted her. “Perhaps next week’s Special will be even more spectacular. Meanwhile, let us plan our little shopping tour in detail, shall we?”

The planning didn’t take long. Once the baby bit was settled, the rest followed easily.

On Tuesday of the following week, therefore, we acted. At twenty minutes to eleven precisely, I pulled up in my station wagon across the street from Dixie’s apartment house on Forest Avenue. Stolen license plates graced the wagon’s bumpers, a collapsed baby stroller rested in the back. Through my open window I could hear the carefree shouts and laughter of the children playing in the yard of the Day Care Center beyond the hedge.

Dixie at once emerged from her apartment—a truly unrecognizable Dixie in blonde wig, outsize sunglasses, colorful head scarf. She strolled across the street to the hedge-bordered play yard of the Day Care Center. For just an instant she disappeared through a small gap in the hedge, then emerged with a fat smiling baby in her arms. The baby had obviously been lured into complacency by Dixie with a peppermint candy which it held in one sticky hand and sucked on noisily.

When they came abreast of me, I opened the door of my station wagon, and Dixie slipped nimbly into the passenger seat beside me, holding the baby as skillfully as though she were born for motherhood. Instantly I pulled away and accelerated gently toward the downtown section of the city. Behind us, no cries were heard, no alarm was sounded, no signal given to indicate that anyone was as yet aware that an eleven-month-old baby had been abducted from the Forest Avenue Day Care Center.

Ten minutes later, in a narrow alley used largely for deliveries and now deserted, I parked the station wagon. Only Fifty paces away, around the corner on Main Street, was Harding’s Jewelry Store, our local Tiffany’s.

Hurriedly I pulled the collapsed stroller from the rear of the car and made it operational. Dixie plopped the baby into it, strapped the infant in, and draped over its small lap a flimsy white blanket which she must have taken from the Day Care Center with the baby. Then, seizing the handle of the stroller and chirping lovingly to the baby, she disappeared around the corner into the noonday crowds of Main Street. The baby still sucked contentedly on its piece of candy. Dixie’s last words to me were, “Keep your motor running, Professor. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes. Okay?”

“Okay.” I got behind the wheel again and settled down to wait, envisioning the sequence of events which would now be initiated by Dixie. She would walk through the wide entrance of Harding’s Jewelry Store, casually pushing the baby in the stroller ahead of her. She would approach a counter and engage a sales clerk in conversation while the baby, no doubt, put sticky Fingerprints from the candy all over the glass front of the nearest display case. Dixie, acting the prosperous young matron with a passion for jewelry, would evince interest in the Special of the Week advertised in yesterday’s newspaper—the inch-wide bracelet of gold paved with square-cut emeralds and diamonds, and specially priced, for this week only, at $22,000.

The clerk would produce this bauble for Dixie’s inspection. And Dixie, falling hopelessly in love at first sight with the beautiful bracelet, would then diffidently inquire of the clerk if she might take the bracelet to the front door of the shop and inspect it in the daylight while the clerk kept an eye on her baby. The clerk would readily assent to this; for what mother could possibly be suspected of a larcenous motive when she left her baby with the clerk as a hostage? Whereupon Dixie would step out to the sidewalk with Harding’s Special of the Week in hand and walk straight around the corner to where I and her getaway car awaited her.

At this point I glanced toward the corner in question and saw Dixie come sprinting around it, the materialization of my thoughts. I noted with approval that she possessed a pretty turn of speed. I flipped open the station-wagon door and she charged in beside me, panting.

“Go!” she exhorted me.

Like a racehorse from the starting gate, I traversed the alley to the next street and turned into the stream of hurrying traffic. Meanwhile, Dixie was tearing off her wig, headscarf, and sunglasses and tucking them away out of sight beneath her seat.

Only when we were well away from the neighborhood of Harding’s Jewelry Store did I turn to my still breathless companion and ask comfortably, “Where is it? Let’s have a look at the Special of the Week.”

She wiped perspiration from her upper lip. “I didn’t get it.”

“What!”

“I didn’t get it, Professor.” She sounded truly contrite. “I didn’t even get a chance to see it.”

My heart sank. Despite my trepidation, however, I remembered out of long habit to keep the station wagon moving briskly. “What went wrong?” I asked Dixie.

“A woman clerk came to wait on me. And the minute she saw the kid in the stroller she yelled, ‘Where’d you get that baby? It isn’t yours!’”

“How could she possibly know that?”

“Because it was hers,” Dixie said.