Read Online Cold Morning by Ed Ifkovic - Free Book Online

severely, his eyes popping behind his thick glasses.
    â€œPerhaps his mother is telling the truth,” I went on.
    Willie was tired of the conversation. “If you say so.”
    â€œWell, I don’t know, but…”
    â€œA sad woman, that one. I met her a couple times at the general store, lugging groceries back to the farm. A widow, survived a drunk husband and a couple dead children. Burned out of a tarpaper hovel thick in the Sourland Mountains. Back of Lambertville, I hear.”
    â€œThis Cody Lee Thomas is an only son?”
    â€œThe only one that lived.” A sigh. “But, as I say, not the swiftest pebble washed up on the beach.”
    â€œNo matter.” I spoke through clenched teeth. “Yes, you’ve mentioned his stupidity too many times, Willie.”
    â€œCan’t help a man observing the world around him.”
    â€œWith compassion, no less.”
    Aleck glanced at me, a nervous tic in his voice. “What is your point, Edna?”
    â€œAnnabel Biggs was up to something larger than a simple misguided romance with a country lout.”
    Aleck rolled his eyes. “What do you think, Willie?” He inserted a cigarette into his holder and lit it. Smoke filled the backseat.
    â€œNot much. I like to keep my mouth shut most times.”
    â€œYes,” I told him, “I’ve noticed.”
    ***
    Willie sat in a tavern across from the Hawthorne Inn—“Have myself a cocktail, just one”—while Aleck and I ate supper, a pleasant enough meal made barely tolerable by the presence of Mavis Jones, who, it turned out, should have used her celebrated psychic powers to glean that Aleck and I would discount every word out of her mouth. A fussy old woman with an ancient fur cap pulled over stringy gray curls and a faded Mother Hubbard under a Persian lamb overcoat, she rattled on about the Germanic guttural mumblings she’d heard the night of the kidnapping. “Out on the road what leads to the colonel’s mansion.”
    Of course, she couldn’t remember exactly when that was, admitted not knowing a word of German, and, in fact, confessed to living miles and miles from Hopewell—“My sister is a pig slaughterer in the woods”—and—well, would she receive payment for her information? Would Aleck have to use her name? She grinned at him, twinkled her eyes, and mentioned listening to his radio broadcasts when the winds and God allowed enough reception.
    Aleck fumed, purposely blowing smoke into her face.
    â€œNo, my dear, it would be better if I not mention your name. I believe you already probably have enough humiliation in your life.”
    â€œAleck!” I admonished, but he shrugged me off.
    Mavis Jones smiled broadly as though he’d complimented her for her discretion and decency or—God knew what?
    â€œI’ll listen again this Sunday,” she assured him.
    â€œThis is all your fault,” I said to Aleck when we got back in the car.
    He sighed. “Of course you’d say that.”
    Aleck’s Sunday night half-hour on WOR out of New York City was growing in popularity. Last week he’d interviewed Darius Poor, a crime reporter from the Daily Mirror , who’d written about the various mythologies that erupted around the notorious kidnapping. A sprightly, somewhat sardonic, interview obviously caught Mavis Jones’ psychic attention. Aleck and Darius made light of the wild rumors surrounding the horrific event, Aleck pooh-poohing three current stories being bandied about: one insisted that the kidnapped baby was not Charles Lindbergh, Jr.—in fact, the body was an anonymous child dumped in the bushes to distract the police. That road was a conduit for bootleg liquor, and the syndicate needed to end police searches there. Moreover, the real baby was being raised elsewhere in the vast Republic. Two, that Al Capone and the mythic Purple Gang were instrumental in kidnapping the