Stepping into a waiting taxi, down to my left.

I headed to the right and picked out another cab. I climbed in, just as the Checker Cab, bearing the babe with the babe, glided by like a memory.

“Follow that car,” I said.

And the cabbie, a rumpled-faced Hunky with a shabby green cap and a wide space between his front teeth, glanced back and grinned. “Figured some day somebody’d ask that.”

“That’s peachy,” I said. “Here’s your fare in advance.”

I showed him my badge, and his cheerfulness faded.

“Might be a fin in it,” I allowed, “if you don’t lose ’em, and they don’t make you.”

“They won’t,” he said, relieved there was maybe a buck in this after all, and wheeled his Yellow out onto Van Buren.

This Bernice Rogers was about thirty, with a record that included prostitution and petty theft. A few months back she had adopted a boy from the Cradle, an Evanston agency; she’d been fussy about the age-had to be less than two years, older than one.

Chief of Detectives Schoemaker, a.k.a. “Old Shoes,” a canny old copper, figured the adopted kid was a front. In which case, it would have gone something like this….

The adopted child is looked after by a woman member of the Bonelli gang (presumably Bernice Rogers) for a number of months. People seeing Rogers with the kid assume it’s hers. In the meantime, the kidnap gang executes a snatch on a specific kid (presumably Charles Lindbergh, Jr.); the woman then substitutes the snatched kid for the adopted one-while the latter is abandoned or otherwise disposed of.

And when Bernice Rogers is seen with the kidnapped child, suspicion is nil because that child is mistaken for the one she’s been seen with previously. You seen one baby, you seen ’em all.