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.