“Well, it’s easy money. What are you gonna do?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Eliot answered it literally. “I’ve sent a petition to the federal government. Recommending capital punishment for the transportation of a kidnapped person from one state to another.”

“You’d like kidnapping to be a federal crime?”

He nodded sharply, smiled the same way. “No offense, Nate, but too many local cops are either incompetent or on the take.”

“I’d tip my hat to you,” I said, “if my hands weren’t so full of apples I took off pushcarts.”

“That’s not fair, Nate.”

“Hey, I’ve seen J. Edgar’s boys operate. Third-rate accountants and lawyers who graduated bottom of the class.”

“I’m not talking about Hoover-I’m talking about my own unit…and the IRS squad, of course. Speaking of which…Elmer Irey and Frank Wilson are going up from Washington, D.C., tomorrow, to Hopewell, New Jersey. To meet with Lindbergh.”

“Why? Kidnapping isn’t a Treasury matter by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Well…I don’t think Lindbergh has any more confidence in J. Edgar’s boys than you do. That’s why he called his pal Ogden Mills…”

“Who?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “The Secretary of the Treasury? Of the United States? Of America?”

“Oh. That Ogden Mills.”

“Lindy wanted Mills to send him the agents who ‘got Capone.’”

“Meaning you, Irey and Wilson.”

“Yes. But I’m tied up with the mop-up operation here, and besides, Irey and Wilson would rather work without me, I’m sure.”

Elmer Irey, Frank Wilson and Eliot Ness were indeed the feds who nailed Capone. Eliot’s Justice Department unit squeezed Capone’s financial nuts in the vise, and confiscated the records Irey, Wilson and their pencil-pushers turned into evidence. But there was friction between Justice man Ness and the IRS boys; both factions seemed to resent the credit taken by the other.