Cold Morning (11 page)

“Well, the secret obviously died with her. With Annabel, I mean.”

“Did it?” A sharp, penetrating gaze, his dark gray eyes shiny.

“I had one brief conversation with the girl, Mr. Flagg. She served me coffee.”

“And yet you visit her murderer and then her roommate.”

“I'm a reporter. I follow leads.”

Aleck harrumphed. “Where is this going?” He pouted. “Why have I been kept in…darkness?”

Joshua sat back, stretched out his legs. “I'm trying to find out what you know, lady. Annabel and Violet and…and even Violet's sister Emily. The three Fates, as it were. Somehow they got mixed into this cauldron of kidnapping and ransom money and death and German illegal aliens to our shores.”

“Well, I don't understand it either,” I concluded.

“Are you sure?”

I sat up straight. “I'm not in the habit of lying, young man. That's the truth.”

His eyes swept the room. He nodded in the direction of Walter Winchell. “Pompous little ass, wouldn't you say?”

“Well,” I smiled, “we agree on something.” A heartbeat. “But that's not why you're sitting with us—to malign a prominent radio personality and hack writer for the
Mirror.
”

He grinned. “I don't miss an opportunity to mock my superiors.”

“That must require an enormous amount of your free time.”

He laughed out loud.

I understood now why he was sitting at our table. He feared we'd stumbled on a piece of a puzzle that was his concern. Or he didn't
want
us to fit the pieces together. He wanted to know what we knew. Either he harbored some horrible secret and was afraid we'd also caught on, or he lacked some details and hoped we'd supply the missing information. A scurrilous young man, a shiftless sort. He was smiling at me now, attempting to woo me. I stared into his face. “I think it's time you left us alone. My coffee is cold.”

When he started to say something, I turned aside. Finally, he walked away.

Chapter Eleven

Aleck and I crossed the street toward the courthouse and showed our passes at the entrance—red for journalists, white for officials, yellow for telegraphers. We were shown to our seats in the packed, hot room. The narrow winding stairs led up to a gallery where spectators and reporters gaped, admitted first come, first served. A high-ceilinged room with yellow walls, large windows on either side and behind the judge's dais. Old church-pew benches lined the walls, folding chairs appropriated from the Flemington Fairgrounds. Reporters scribbled on pine boards—no typewriters allowed. Five hundred folks were jam-packed in the room, and I noticed one man, his overcoat bulky and pitched to his side, concealed the lens of a forbidden camera. The judge had ordered no cameras, no newsreels, but the click and blip of mechanical noises surfaced as we waited.

Attorney General David Wilentz was trying his first criminal case. A young man, probably in his thirties, a rail-thin handsome man with a slender dark face, shiny black hair, he'd stepped into the Union Hotel lounge the day before dressed in a snazzy suit, a pearl-gray felt fedora with the brim snapped down in front and to one side, a velvet-collared Chesterfield overcoat, a white silk scarf encircling his neck. But now standing before the judge, he wore a simple blue suit, a stiff, high-collared white shirt, and an understated striped tie and handkerchief—the country lawyer gone to court.

He spent the morning thundering about the quality of lumber, his witness a “wood expert,” a scholar who had a lot to say about the various types of wood that compose the kidnapping ladder—and one piece in particular that Wilentz insisted—he hammered home the idea, his facile voice rising as he faced the jury—came from Bruno Hauptmann's own attic.

“Impressive young man,” I whispered to Aleck.

The testimony was countered by the celebrated defense lawyer Edward Reilly, a fiftyish man, towering with a massive stomach, a man who dressed in a formal dark morning coat, a white carnation in his buttonhole, striped gray trousers and white spats, a Biblical prophet bullying the witness who refused to back down. His elegant attire was emphatically out of place in this small-town courtroom. This could not work to Hauptmann's advantage, a fact I whispered to Aleck.

Aleck whispered back. “The man's a drunk. He may be drunk now.”

The scuttlebutt in Nellie's Taproom suggested that Reilly had been falling-down drunk the day after New Year's and, at one point, had danced around a flagpole on Main Street. Surrounded by a changing bevy of busty women he called “secretaries,” he was being paid by Hearst—in fact, Reilly confided that he didn't like Bruno Hauptmann and let another lawyer, Lloyd Fisher, do the interviews with the suspect. Reilly met with Bruno for a matter of minutes. With his ruddy face, his reeling posture, and his circus antics, Big Ed spent his time at a local tavern during the trial's lunch break.

As Wilentz thundered on, his finger pointing at Bruno Hauptmann, the accused stared at him, face rigid, chin up, spine erect. I watched the room, jotted a note or two. Spectators, bored with the laborious details of the science of lumber, did crossword puzzles, flipped through the pages of a movie magazine, one old woman knitting a sweater. A juror chewed tobacco with an intensity that would shame a cow and her cud. Another juror, a plump woman with pin curls, yawned and nodded to someone in the gallery.

A crowd of spectators had bunched at the back, and I was surprised to see Horace Tripp standing behind a smaller man. As Wilentz finished up, I followed Horace's gaze. He was staring at Bruno Hauptmann. He never seemed to blink, so intent was his glare. When Wilentz remarked that Hauptmann had been a soldier in the Great War, a man who served the Kaiser and fought American servicemen, a man trained to kill, a heartless machine-gunner, Horace actually let out a gruff cough. Of course, I knew he'd fought in the war, had returned bitter, and had no doubt that the illegal German immigrant who sneaked onto our shores and massacred a hero's baby…well, that man had to die. I was so enthralled by the back of the room—Horace's eyes finally found mine and he made a helpless shrug that made little sense—that I missed Wilentz's closing remarks, though Aleck, jotting something in his pad, broke the tip of his pencil and matter-of-factly reached over and took mine from my hand. I let him.

As the lawyers bickered over some legal fine point, I sized up Bruno Hauptmann as he watched his wife, Anna, sitting on the side. Bruno was dressed in a loose, double-breasted gray suit, a handkerchief neatly inserted in his pocket, a careful slicked-back haircut. With his penetrating blue eyes, that chestnut hair, his high cheekbones, pointed clean-shaven chin, he struck me as emotionless—severe, stoic, sullen, an alarming blankness in his look. An arrogant man, I thought, one who was looking with contempt at the proceedings, a man who did not believe he'd be found guilty.

At one point Colonel Lindbergh twisted in his seat, said something to Henry Breckinridge, sitting at his side, and Bruno flicked his head for barely a second. He refused to look at the aviator. Sitting four chairs away from Bruno, Lindbergh had none of the spiff and polish of the well-groomed Bruno—he sported a gray suit without a vest, a frayed shirt cuff, chaotic hair. When he moved, a coat seam looked ready to give. But that same movement revealed the .38 in a shoulder holster under his jacket.

At four-thirty, Judge Trenchard called it a day. As Bruno was led out, he mumbled some words to his wife. It looked like he said, “Don't worry.”

Anna Hauptmann trembled. A plain-looking woman with strawberry blond hair, a drab hausfrau who struck me as an odd companion for the matinee idol husband, she was dressed in a simple navy-blue dress with a cowl neck, a small black felt hat over sensible curls. A white medal hung from her neck on a black ribbon. I recalled such women in the Bavarian marketplace—sturdy, buxom, earthy, washed-out eyes, and clipped words. Strong-jawed, unattractive.

She watched as Bruno was led out by a state trooper.

David Wilentz, gathering his papers, then stepped into the aisle.

The spectators applauded madly.

***

In the early darkness as snow showers cast halos around the streetlights, I took a walk. Aleck had gone back to his room to write his column, but I begged off. The horrid spectacle of the courtroom ate at me. The laughter rocking the courtroom, the jeering, the applause, the merry jostling crowds, the fur-decked society folks who spotted friends from Manhattan and waved across the room as the judge made an announcement, and then demanded silence. A party, this, and a wonderful time for so many. And Anna Hauptmann, that dowdy, confused wife of an alleged killer, occasionally stared back, wide-eyed, at an America she could never understand. Her eyes showed bafflement, some resentment, and finally absolute wonder.

I strolled slowly, lost in muddled thought, vaguely aware of groups of people shoving by, heading to supper, turning into taverns. The Candy Kitchen had a line of customers buying bags of sweets. The Blue Bow Tea Room placed a “today's special” sign in the window: “German chocolate cake.” At least this was not as tasteless as the Union Hotel Café featuring “Hauptmann Pudding.”

A snow flurry surprised me, and I spun away from a blast of sharp icy air. At that moment, wiping flakes from my face, I spotted someone standing in the entrance of a building. Peggy Crispen, bundled up in a threadbare winter coat, a scarf wrapped around her neck. Not her own roominghouse, I noticed, which was two or three doors down, but a small clapboard-and-brick building that housed a haberdashery on the ground level, now closed, the lights switched off. Peggy stood on the stoop, shivering.

“Peggy, for God's sake.” I rushed to her. “You're dying of the cold. What in the world?”

Her voice was tinny, faraway. “I don't know, Miss Ferber. I'm afraid to go inside. I'm afraid…I…”

“But you can't stay out here. You'll die of the cold.”

I reached out my hand and touched her elbow, but she shook me off. “I know. I will go in. But not yet.” She glanced down the street, and I noticed her eyes settled on a small tavern, a spotlight illuminating the façade. The White Birch Tavern. A door swung open and a trio of partiers strolled out. The sound of music from a jukebox, a country-western ditty. The strum of a fiddle.

“I gotta think what to do.”

“Come with me, Peggy. I'll find a place for you. You can't…”

Suddenly her hand flew out at me as she spoke through clenched teeth. “Go away. All of you. Goddammit. I just wanna be left alone. None of this ain't supposed to happen. None of it is my fault. I don't know these people…these stories…Annabel's nonsense. Now it all falls on me, and…and, someone keeps knocking on my door.”

“Who is it?”

“I don't know. I won't answer. Then the phone rings in the hallway and someone yells it's for me. I won't come out. That Joshua fellow lingers on the street, watches for me, bothers me.”

“I heard you were let go at the restaurant.”

A loud, phony laugh. “Yeah, that was coming. I point the finger at Martha. It ain't my fault she's married to a cad, that man who won't leave you alone.”

“Did he and Annabel…?”

That surprised her. “No, she had no liking for him and made that clear. But Martha thought she did—
her
, not me. Big laugh. Me, the fat one. She doesn't trust Horace. But, you know, I thought he'd fight for me. Help me keep my job. He just stood there and watched them humiliate me. Now what am I gonna do? No money, nothing.” She swayed in the doorway and let out a sob.

I hesitated but went on. “You were seeing him in secret, Peggy?”

A harsh laugh. “A funny way you put things, Miss Ferber. A secret that was no secret because he crowed about every conquest. I let that fool into my life because I was lonely in this godforsaken town, and I don't know why. A little flattery and a few dollars spent on me at the bar. Nobody around that I could be friends with. Just people I meet in taverns who can't remember my name the next day. But Horace, well, he wooed me. I knew he was married but I didn't care.” Shaking from the cold, she drew back into a corner as a blast of wind shook her.

“You knew that couldn't have a good ending, Peggy.”

“He's suave and slick and says these nice things. I'm a fat girl without a mirror.”

“Still.”

“You know what he told me, Miss Ferber?”

“What is that?” I waited while she rubbed a handkerchief across her nose.

“He said he was gonna leave Martha when the trial was over, and I said, ‘Will you take me with you?' And you know what he did? He laughed like a crazy fool, and he said, ‘Men like me don't marry girls like you.'”

“Lord, what did you say?”

A throaty laugh. “That's the sad thing. I looked at him and said, ‘Yeah, I know.' And I still let him follow me home. I'd sneak him into the room.” She stepped away from the stoop. “Please leave me alone, Miss Ferber.” Still shivering, she tottered down the sidewalk and disappeared into the tavern.

Chapter Twelve

Colonel Charles Lindbergh took the stand.

Someone at the back of the courtroom applauded but stopped abruptly when someone else shushed him.

I thought of Damon Runyon's muttering that first day—a circus, this trial. Runyon, in fact, was sitting a row behind me, arms folded over his chest and glaring across the room, as though waiting for something egregious to happen. As we all waited for the morning to begin, watching the celebrated aviator moving to a chair, the atmosphere was titillation and sputtered glee.

Opening night on Broadway, I thought: a hum of anticipation and the swish of fur and beaded purse and elegant dinner jacket. For, indeed, it was celebrity time in the packed room: Ginger Rogers, Frederic March, and Jack Dempsey. Earlier, a Rolls-Royce had pulled up to the curb and a jeweled matron stepped onto the sidewalk and waited to be looked at, led with suitable salaams into the inner sanctums. She'd been subpoenaed—not that she'd testify today, but that meant she'd be guaranteed a seat.

When Judge Trenchard walked in, I expected quiet—instead, there was a low rumbling of joy. The show was about to begin again.

Colonel Lindbergh looked at ease on the witness stand, sitting with crossed legs on a hard-backed chair, a slouch to his posture, his head tilted to the right. A lock of that infernal blond hair slipped down over his forehead, and for a moment he tossed back his head, willing it back into place.

Bruno Hauptmann refused to take his eyes off Lindbergh.

Everyone was waiting for Lindbergh to name Bruno the killer. Yesterday's testimony had been riveting, true—but routine. Now David Wilentz led Lindbergh through the blow-by-blow events of the awful night—his return home from the city, dinner with Anne, chatting with her in the living room when he heard what sounded like a slat of an orange crate snapping against the side of the house. He never investigated, assuming it was the wind.

“Was it the sort of noise that would come with the falling of a ladder?”

“Yes, it was, if the ladder was outside.”

They discovered the baby missing. “I was reading in the library, and Miss Gow called to me in a rather excited voice and asked me if I had the baby.”

“What else?”

An envelope on top of the radiator. Wilentz waved it then—and the note inside. Wilentz read the fearsome ransom note, stumbling over the garbled English and the fragmented sentences.

Throughout the long morning and afternoon sessions, I kept an eye on Bruno Hauptmann. David Wilentz repeatedly pointed at him, forcing Lindbergh to stare at the accused. A sullen look on his face, suspicious.

Bruno, Bruno, Bruno.

The word echoed in the chamber, ominous, dangerous, ugly.

Each time he thundered Bruno's name, a barely audible hiss rolled through the crowd, raw, angry. The judge looked up, seemed ready to admonish the crowd, but simply stared.

At lunchtime, I watched Lindbergh leave with Anne, Colonel Schwarzkopf, and Colonel Breckinridge, and the crowd outside howled like banshees and pushed and shoved. “Hang him! Hang him!” When the sheriff opened the back doors, reporters who'd been forced to remain inside, now were anxious to wire or phone in the morning's proceedings and pushed over one another, shoving, yelling, sheaves of paper spilling out of their pockets, as they raced to the streets or upstairs where a room of telephones and telegraphs had been established to facilitate reporting to the hinterlands.

I walked with Aleck to the church basement for lunch. Knowing his rapacious love of the good ladies' bounty—today's advertised special for fifty cents was roast chicken with parsley-buttered potatoes and peach cobbler with homemade vanilla ice cream, a menu Aleck had whispered to me during one of the lulls in Charles Lindbergh's testimony. Aleck bounded down those well-worn wooden steps. His tiny hands dropped a half dollar into the plate as though tithing ordered by Biblical scripture.

***

Late that afternoon I found my mind wandering, speculating. News accounts all noted that Hauptmann never used the name “Bruno,” even though it was his given Christian name. He was known all his life as “Richard.” His wife supposedly didn't know his given first name. Some of his friends called him “Rich”—so American, so back-lot baseball. But the press had latched onto “Bruno” with a vengeance. Why? I wondered. So many news accounts kept referring to him as “the German” or “the alien” or the “illegal stowaway” or “the monster” who'd invaded our shores. Perhaps “Bruno” smacked more of an outsider, the ethnic pariah. So what if his wife and friends knew him as “Richard”? He'd become the notorious “Bruno” forevermore.

So, as I watched Hauptmann stare at Lindbergh, I realized there were two Hauptmanns at war in Flemington, two different men. Bruno, the inhuman violator of a hero's family, cold, ice in his veins, the solo perpetrator of the heinous crime. And Richard, the affable Bronx carpenter who was the proud father of little Manfred (ironically named after the Great War's German aviator hero, Baron Richthofen, the Red Baron), the man who swam at Hunter's Island in Pelham Bay Park with friends, drifted in his canoe while strumming his mandolin, had birthday celebrations, went to the movies, waited for his wife to finish her shift at Frederickson's Bakery in order to drive her home. The young family man, fashioning a life under the bright sun of the American Dream.

Bruno or Richard—was there a third man who embraced both?

Maybe.

A man caught with fourteen grand of ransom money hidden in his makeshift garage floor.

A man who lied about the money. Who told many lies. Who blamed it on the dead German friend Isidor Fisch—little Izzy—who'd returned to Leipzig and promptly died of tuberculosis. “The Fisch story,” the papers glibly termed it. The man with the consumptive cough had left suitcases and a shoebox with Bruno. Supposedly he owed Bruno money for a shared business venture, trading in furs. When there was a leak in the attic, the box on a shelf got wet and Bruno supposedly discovered the cash. He didn't know it was ransom money, he claimed. He freely spent some—he never hid his face when he did so—and hid the rest from his wife. He traveled to Maine, Florida, Canada, but no ransom money surfaced there. Why not unload it there? Why just New York City? I wondered about that.

A Fisch story, they called it in court. A killer. A kidnapper.

Lindbergh was talking about the second ransom note.

Dear Sir, We have warned you not to make anything public or notify the police. Now you have to take the consequences.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann watched, and I watched him. And I watched his wife, Anna.

At one point Walter Winchell, seated directly behind the prosecution table, jotted something down on a pad and slipped it to Wilentz, who paused in his questioning of Lindbergh, glanced back at the reporter with a trace of annoyance in his face, and nodded. Winchell sat back, satisfied, though immediately he began jotting another note. Wilentz dropped the first onto his table, and I wondered whether his next questions to the aviator were, in fact, supplied by the intrusive reporter. When I looked to see Judge Trenchard's reaction, there was none. He was tapping a pencil as he watched Lindbergh cross his legs, lean back, and consider a response.

Well, of course, I thought—Walter Winchell was so often seen at old-time speakeasies and Broadway openings, chit-chatting with those fawning around him, sometimes jotting down what I assumed were dazzling witticisms and satiric thrusts and handing them to his acolytes. Rumor had it he hung around with Owney Madden, a Hell's Kitchen mob boss. Why should the murder trial be any different?

David Wilentz's voice dropped, and the aviator leaned forward to hear. At that moment his double-breasted blazer opened and I spotted the small revolver.

I nudged Aleck. “The gun.”

“So what?” he said.

“In court?”

“Perhaps he's going to shoot the man who stole his baby.”

“And you approve?”

“It will save the taxpayers a fortune.”

“And be a miscarriage of justice.”

“No one would care.”

“I would. This isn't the Wild West, Aleck. He isn't Billy the Kid. Wyatt Earp.” I stammered. “Hopalong Cassidy.”

His eyebrows rose. “Hopalong Cassidy? He never existed.”

“You get my point.”

“He's trying to make a point.”

“Which is?”

“He's not a man to be fooled with.”

“Maybe he'll shoot Walter Winchell, who is clearly the prosecution's amanuensis. You did see that creep slip Wilentz a note?”

“That surprised me, I admit.”

“Maybe I should slip Bruno Hauptmann a note.”

Aleck ran his tongue into his cheek. “I'm surprised you haven't already. A mash note scented with your cloying gardenia perfume.”

I turned my back on him.

Judge Trenchard called it a day.

***

Back in my room, resting on the bed, I skimmed through a folder of articles supplied by the editor at the
Times
. Yes, all the minutia of the daily trial fascinated me, especially watching the celebrated Lindbergh, arguably the most famous and popular man in America—in the world?—slowly and methodically recount the unimaginable horrors of the past few years. But what had come to fascinate me was the chronicle of Annabel Biggs and her cousin Violet Sharp.
That
dynamic.
That
puzzle. I reread articles from the immediate days of the kidnapping, the iterated questioning of the skittish and volatile Violet Sharp, the frightened young British girl who crumbled before the authorities.

Something had happened in the Morrow household. But what? A prank, planned, according to Peggy. A prank that involved Dwight Morrow, Jr.'s involvement with Blake Somerville—and Violet Sharp, who obviously had a fascination with the mysterious man. But what? A prank to kidnap the baby—make-believe? Make the child disappear from home? Ransom money handed over? But was it just a foolish barroom game they played—and Violet believed it? Or had they really done it? A fake kidnapping of Little Lindy that went awry? Impossible. Dwight and Blake at Amherst College. Then meeting again at an insane asylum in Montclair? Impossible. Violet's confession to her cousin in a series of letters, and the last one the most explosive—a letter missing now or destroyed. Letters that brought Annabel Biggs to Flemington to extort cash from Lindbergh. Blackmail. The sacrosanct Morrow family—Dwight, the shunned son. That seemed farfetched, but…Annabel now murdered, and not by Cody Lee Thomas. That much I knew. And her room violated again. Those letters possibly taken. Hard to know. A letter searched for and found by Peggy Crispen, an innocent victim of the drama, now scared out of her wits.

Violet Sharp. A suicide.

But did she still hold the answer?

How did Bruno Richard Hauptmann figure in all of this?

I reread an article that talked of Violet's activities the night of March 1, 1932, her visit to a roadhouse with Ernie Miller and another couple. They drank illegal beer. She drank coffee. Only coffee. Why? Ernie was asked. He didn't know. In fact, he didn't know anything about her. He'd been driving on Lydecker Street in Englewood and spotted Violet and her sister, Emily, walking. Thinking he knew them, he stopped, and, flirting, invited Violet to go out. No, no, she said, but gave him her number. One time—the night of the kidnapping.

Ernie Miller. He might have the answer.

I was late meeting Aleck at the Puritan Restaurant down the street. He was seated at a table by the window and had already eaten. Peeved, he pointed to the remains of a chocolate cake. A smear of chocolate rested ingloriously on a plump cheek.

“Saving that for later?” I asked him.

“Edna, Edna, the problem with our conversations is that I find myself waking up in the middle of them.”

“Ernie Miller.” I stared into his face.

“Now you're speaking in tongue.” A pause. “Singular.”

“He's the one who took Violet Sharp to that speakeasy the night of the kidnapping.”

“We all know that, Edna.” He signaled to the waiter for another piece of cake. I ordered baked chicken, though I wasn't hungry. “And he's scheduled to testify for the prosecution in an upcoming session.”

“But he may have information on this…this cockamamie tale that Annabel spun—the rich boy's prank, although I hardly think ‘prank' is the proper word here.”

“If prank it were, Ferb. To my thinking, Annabel and Violet exchanged giddy schoolgirl letters, imagined romances and imagined wealth and outright nonsense.
Nothing
of that happened.”

I broke in. “You don't believe that, Aleck. Annabel was murdered.”

His mouth was stuffed with cake. “Yes, by the country hick named Cody Lee Thomas, dirt under his nails and hayseed in his buck teeth.”

“No, he didn't do it.”

Aleck waited a long time. “Edna dear, you're like a vaudeville skit in which one end of the horse rides west, the other east.”

“I need to meet with Ernie Miller.”

Aleck choked as he sipped coffee. “Impossible.”

“You have more power at the
Times
—on Broadway—than I do. Find me an address. Set up a meeting.”

He banged a fist on the table. “I will not be a part of this.”

“Frankly, I don't want you there. You scare children.”

“Obviously not enough.” He winked at me.

“They told me to follow up human interest leads, the
Times
did. This is one.”

Aleck got serious, his fingers gripping a cigarette and slipping it into his ivory holder. “Leave this alone, Ferb.”

“No, I won't.”

“I will not speak at your funeral.”

“And why not?”

“A waste of my words. There will be no one there to hear my eloquent lies.”

“An empty room has never stopped you before.”