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“Thanks,” Berenice said and hung up.12

It rained hard all that Monday in Oklahoma City. Berenice spent the day pacing the drawing room, waiting. When Kirkpatrick returned from Kansas City, Gus Jones drove him to the FBI office to review mug shots. Weatherford saw no one he recognized.

“What do you think? Will they release him?” Kirkpatrick asked as they returned to the mansion.

Jones shook his head. “It’s a poor bet,” he said. “If they feel he can identify the hideout, he doesn’t stand a chance. They told you he’d be home within twelve hours. He isn’t. Their letter said they were gonna hold him until all the money had been examined and exchanged. Now that’s something that could take weeks. The longer they hold him the more dangerous it becomes.”

“Then you don’t think he’ll make it back?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“I won’t say that,” said Jones. “But I will say that if he’s not back by sunup tomorrow, he won’t be back.”

When night fell, tensions rose in the Urschel mansion. The only moment of levity came after one of the lawyers saw a mouse. He retrieved a mousetrap from the kitchen and slipped it under a divan, then forgot about it. Later that night, as the rain drummed outside, a loud pop sounded. Mrs. Urschel jumped to her feet, frightened.

“What was that?” she asked. The lawyer smiled. “Just the mouse being caught, Berenice,” he said.

And then, around eleven, the backdoor opened and Charles Urschel walked in. He was unshaven. His eyes blinked. Mrs. Urschel ran to him and fell into his arms. He had been dropped off in the suburb of Norman an hour earlier and had taken a taxi home.

Gus Jones was called and arrived at 11:00. Urschel said he was too tired to talk. Jones insisted. Urschel said he couldn’t identify the kidnappers and didn’t know where he had been taken. Jones took him by the arm and told him it was okay. Then he led him into the study, closed the door, and began to ask questions.

With Gus Jones transferred to the Urschel case, the Kansas City Massacre investigation began to drift. No one in custody had shed any light on Verne Miller’s whereabouts or who his partners were. The Hot Springs bookie Dick Galatas had vanished, as had Pretty Boy Floyd, though most agents discounted his involvement. Harvey Bailey and the other Kansas escapees were loose in Oklahoma, robbing banks at will, but the Bureau had mounted no credible efforts to apprehend them.

Then on July 31, the day Urschel was released, came a rocket from New York: agents there had found Verne Miller’s girlfriend, Vi Mathias. She was living under the alias “Vivian Allen” in a luxurious apartment on Central Park West. The initial report of the New York SAC, Frank X. Fay, identified her host as thirty-six-year-old “Louis or Philip Buckwalt (also known as Bucholtz, Buchouse or Buchalter)” and added: “Preliminary investigation with respect to him has disclosed that even though he resides in luxury, he is somewhat of a notorious character.”13 It is a measure of the FBI’s meager knowledge of the American underworld in 1933 that Fay had little sense of who this man was.

Vi Mathias’s host is better known to history as Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. A founding member of the New York syndicate along with Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Buchalter had just been named head of its syndicate’s enforcement arm, Murder, Inc., which he ran alongside his traditional narcotics and labor-union rackets. How Buchalter came to meet Verne Miller will never be known for certain, but the FBI later picked up reports that Buchalter had hired Miller on several occasions to murder rival mobsters. However they met, Buchalter knew Miller well enough to hide his girlfriend.

New York agents had been closing in on Vi Mathias since July 19, when the St. Paul office, which was intercepting her parents’ mail, called to say her daughter Betty had received a box of saltwater taffy sent from Atlantic City. A New York agent tracked down the store where the taffy was bought and