I was sitting on one of three chairs at an unenclosed shoeshine stand against the wall facing the tracks in the train shed of LaSalle Street Station. This particular chair was damn near home to me when I pulled duty here; the shoeshine boy, Cletus, a lad of seventy or so, didn’t mind-as long as I got up and wandered off and let him make a living, when the station got busy.

Which was what I needed to do anyway, about now, prowl around and keep an eye out for single-o dips, moll whizzers and cannon mobs. Besides, it was winter, and warmer in the train station itself, rather than out here on the noisy, windy platform.

I was a plainclothes detective on the pickpocket detail, under Lt. Louis Sapperstein, and it was my job to hang around train stations and bus depots and the like, just me and the perverts, looking to get lucky.

And maybe I had gotten real lucky, this afternoon-lucky as Lindy when he made it across the Atlantic. I was already the youngest plainclothes dick on the department; maybe I could be its youngest lieutenant.

We’d been handed a circular this morning, sent around by Chief of Detectives Schoemaker to every division in town, showing a brunette, attractive, hard-faced woman named Bernice Rogers, who was an “associate” of one Joseph Bonelli, “reputed New Jersey kidnap-ring chieftain.” Schoemaker considered both Bonelli and his moll likely candidates for the Lindbergh snatch. This was not so farfetched: most of the country had either Chicago’s Capone crowd or Detroit’s Purple Gang pegged as the culprits.

As if to ward off that suspicion, Capone himself-locked up in Cook County Jail, after his recent tax-evasion conviction-was filling the papers full of indignation, concern and reward offers for the return of the kid. Hell, Big Al was a parent, too, wasn’t he?