Stolen Away (34 page)

“Because of reactions similar to yours, from myself, an aide and a criminologist present,” Hoffman said, “Mr. Hochmuth realized he’d guessed wrong. So he tried again—and identified that eighteen-inch-tall silver cup, filled with flowers, as a woman’s hat.”

“He never did get it right?”

“His third try was closest: a bowl of fruit.”

“Well, law of averages. At least it didn’t glare at him.”

He sorted some more. “And now we come to Millard Whited, a Sourlands hillbilly who claimed he saw Hauptmann prowling near the Lindbergh estate. Mr. Whited, it seems, is on the one hand impoverished, and on the other, a liar; so say his neighbors, at any rate.”

“Wasn’t it Whited’s testimony that got Hauptmann extradited from New York to here?”

Hoffman nodded. “Whited was brought to the Bronx courthouse to make an eyewitness identification, which he did. But I have in my possession…” He patted the stack of documents before him. “…statements Whited gave the State Police within two months of the crime that he hadn’t seen any suspicious persons in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate. So I invited Mr. Whited—at my expense—for a visit.”

“Did he think your loving cup was a hat?”

“No. But he did admit he’d received a one-hundred-fifty-dollar fee, thirty-five dollars’ expenses per diem and a promise of a share of the reward money. Particularly interesting, considering on the witness stand at Flemington, he denied receiving anything but dinner money.”

“That thirty-five bucks per diem jibes with what I got paid for coming out.” Apparently I wasn’t important enough to get a fee, though.

“The other eyewitnesses are similarly suspect. The cab driver, Perrone, it turns out positively identified several
other
suspects as ‘John,’ before Hauptmann’s arrest. The traveling salesman, Rossiter, who claimed he saw Hauptmann changing a tire near Princeton, three days before the kidnapping, is a known embezzler and thief. The movie-theater cashier, Mrs. Barr, sold tickets to over fifteen hundred people on the night of November twenty-sixth, 1933, but could pick Hauptmann out, a year later, as a man who gave her a folded five-dollar bill that turned out to be one of the ransom bills. Never mind that November twenty-sixth is Hauptmann’s birthday, and that on that night he and his wife and friends were at home celebrating.”

“Quite an array, these witnesses.”

“Yes, but we mustn’t forget the celebrity. The man who made a positive eyewitness identification of Hauptmann based upon two words he heard spoken a block away—four years before.”

Charles A. Lindbergh.

“And then of course,” he continued, flicking cigar ash into a silver ashtray, “there’s Jafsie. That wonderful American—who when I reopened this investigation, and announced that I wanted to question him, promptly left on an extended vacation to Panama.”

I had to laugh. “Is he still gone?”

“Actually, he’s supposed to have returned today. And he is one of the people I want you to go around and question.”

“All right, but only because you’re paying me. Last I heard, old Jafsie was hitting the vaudeville circuit, with a Lindbergh lecture.”

“Well,” Hoffman said, “I can tell you one thing he didn’t lecture about: the period when he was the chief
suspect
in the case. I have an affidavit declaring that after Condon initially failed to identify Hauptmann as John at the Greenwich Street Police Station in the Bronx…and he was
adamant
about not identifying Hauptmann, there…Jafsie was intimidated and threatened by the police.”

“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t.”

“That was New York. Two Jersey state troopers have indicated to me that Condon was threatened by Schwarzkopf and his bullyboy Welch with an indictment for obstructing justice…which is what they got Commodore Curtis on, you may recall…if the old boy didn’t recant and identify Hauptmann as ‘Cemetery John.’”

“No wonder Jafsie changed his tune.”

“He was quoted by a trooper as saying, ‘I would not like to be indicted in New Jersey, for they would choke you for a cherry in New Jersey.’”

I laughed at that. “One of Jafsie’s few intentionally humorous remarks,” I said. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Who else do you want me to see?”

“Well, among others, check in with Gaston Means.”

“Means! Isn’t he in Leavenworth?”

“That’s his official federal residence. Right now he’s under observation at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. For what he himself refers to as ‘high brain blood pressure.’ At the same time, he’s been bombarding my office with confessions; claims he’s the one who engineered the kidnapping.”

I sighed. “It’s a waste of time, but I’ll talk to him.”

“I know. But these hoaxers all seem to have some element of truth, or near-truth, in their stories.”

“That’s how a good con is mounted, Governor. So let me guess the next name on your list: Commodore John Hughes Curtis.”

“Not necessarily next, but yes, do check in with him. You do realize, Mr. Heller, that the State of New Jersey convicted Curtis on an obstructing-justice charge, on the assumption he’d had contact with the actual kidnap gang?”

“He got off with a fine and a suspended sentence, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but my point is, in the same courtroom as the Hauptmann trial, one of the same prosecutors, and the same judge, convicted Curtis—why? Because, they said, he’d dealt with six persons who had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby; that by not letting the state troopers in on his actions, Curtis had prevented the apprehension of the kidnappers.”

“So the Garden State is having it both ways: a kidnap gang, to convict Curtis; a lone-wolf kidnapper, to convict Hauptmann.”

“Exactly. And it doesn’t wash with me. There’s more, there’s so much more….” He went riffling through the papers: he began rattling off the injustices.

A copy of a physical examination by Dr. Thurston H. Dexter on September 25, 1934, a few days after Hauptmann’s arrest, showed that the prisoner had been “subjected recently to a severe beating, all or mostly with blunt instruments.”

Work records at the Majestic Apartments, where Hauptmann claimed he was working during the period of the kidnapping, had been tampered with and in some cases stolen or suppressed.

A statement from fingerprint expert Erasmus Hudson, who found five-hundred-some prints on the kidnap ladder, none of them Hauptmann’s, and said that Inspector Welch had asked him if it were possible to fake a fingerprint. (Hudson had said no, much to Welch’s obvious disappointment.)

Judge Trenchard denying Hauptmann’s request for a lie-detector test.

And there was new evidence, too: handwriting expert Samuel Small demonstrated that Hauptmann wrote in the Palmer-Zaner system and not the vertical roundhand system of the ransom notes. In his affidavit, Small wrote: “It isn’t a question of
if
Hauptmarm wrote those letters. It is a question whether he
could
have written them. I tell you that if you went to the prison and said to Hauptmann, ‘I will let you free if you can write a single sentence the way it is written in the ransom letters,’ Hauptmann would have to stay in prison the rest of his life.”

Of course, I knew—like just about any cop who’d been in and around the court system in major criminal cases—that handwriting experts, like alienists, were typical, “expert” testimony. Both sides had theirs. Bought and paid.

“You realize, don’t you,” Hoffman said, “that the state spent more money on its handwriting experts alone than was spent on the entire Hauptmann defense.”

“Even with Hearst footing part of the bill?”

“Even then. It cost over a million dollars to put Hauptmann on death row…but right now I don’t have a single dollar of state funds available to try to get him
off
death row.”

“Excuse me?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

“Mr. Heller, I staked the investigators I mentioned on my own—on small sums that barely covered their expenses, out of my own meager resources.”

“Governor, no offense—but the terms we discussed on the phone, those aren’t negotiable.”

“I’m not the one paying your fee, Mr. Heller.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I mentioned an old friend of yours…just a moment.” The intercom on his desk was buzzing. A garbled voice spoke to the governor, and he said, “Fine. Send her in.” He looked up at me with his ready smile; he put out his cigar. “The party who
recommended
you is paying for your services.”

The door opened behind me and a small handsome woman in a black dress and a black fur and a black hat with a black veil entered; jewelry glittered amidst the somber apparel. Perpetually in mourning for who knows what, Evalyn Walsh McLean entered the room, and reentered my life.

“Governor,” she said, smiling sadly, extending him her black-gloved hand; he rose behind the desk and took it, briefly. She turned to me. Behind the veil her eyes seemed tragic and delighted. “Nathan. It’s wonderful to see you.”

“Likewise, Mrs. McLean,” I said, taking her hand briefly. I gave her my chair and got myself a new one. I was suddenly nervous.

“Mrs. McLean has never lost her interest in the Lindbergh case,” the governor said.

“The official solution of this case,” she said, regally, “is not satisfactory. There are loose ends to be gathered up. And I felt Nathan Heller was just the man to do the gathering.”

She looked older, of course, but fine; her figure remained slender, busty, her face gaining character with the years without losing beauty.

“Mrs. McLean has rented the Hauptmann apartment,” Hoffman said. “So you can have a look around there. We’ve already had a criminologist in, and a wood expert, to have a look in the attic.”

The prosecution’s star witness was a wood expert named Koehler—who’d been about to testify the day I was at the trial, but got stalled by the defense.

“It struck me as ridiculous,” Evalyn said, “that a man who supposedly was so brilliant, so clever a master criminal that he could engineer the kidnapping of the century all alone, would also be so
stupid
as to fashion a single rail of the kidnap ladder from a floorboard in his own attic.”

“Actually,” I said, “what’s really ridiculous is the notion he’d need the lumber. Hauptmann was a carpenter. He had something of a workshop in his garage, didn’t he? There must’ve been scrap lumber all over hell.”

“And a lumberyard nearby,” Hoffman added, nodding.

“In any event, he wouldn’t have left the ladder behind,” I said. “Not a carpenter who fashioned it himself—particularly if one rail were a board from his own house. That evidence was as planted as the tree it came from.”

“So said our criminologist and a wood technician from the WPA,” Hoffman said, rather proudly. “The ladder rail was a sixteenth of an inch thicker than the attic boards. Also, the nail holes weren’t deep enough to accommodate eightpenny nails that came from the attic floor.”

“That ladder,” Evalyn said bitterly, “was what Prosecutor Wilentz pledged to ‘hang around Hauptmann’s neck.’”

“And he did,” Hoffman said. “The question is, Mr. Heller, can you give us something as major as that ladder—only favorable, and not fabricated? Something that no one, no matter how biased, could deny?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have very long, do I?”

“The end of the month.” He shrugged. “Fourteen days.”

“Hell,” I said, with blatantly phony optimism, “maybe Ellis Parker is right, and the kid’s still alive. Maybe I can track the boy down and sit him right there on your desk, and he can have an ice-cream cone while you phone his folks.”

Hoffman smiled at that, but sadly.

“We’ve tried everything,” Evalyn said, shaking her head, sighing. “I even hired the top defense attorney in the country, but it didn’t work out.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Why, Sam Leibowitz, of course,” she said. “But the approach Sam took was disastrous.”

Sam Leibowitz!

“How so?” I asked.

Hoffman sighed. “He was convinced Hauptmann was guilty. The few times he visited Hauptmann, he tried to badger a confession out of him. Felt if he could convince Hauptmann to name his accomplices, then Hauptmann’s life would be spared.”

“And how did Hauptmann react?”

“With his usual quiet indignation,” Hoffman said. “He did not crack—and Leibowitz was off the case as quickly as he came on.”

“Don’t you know,” I asked Evalyn, “who Leibowitz is?”

“Certainly,” she said stiffly, defensively. “He’s the best damn trial attorney in the country.” Then studying me, she melted and said, “Why, Nathan? What do you mean?”

I looked at Hoffman. “You told me about Reilly. Now I’ll tell you about Leibowitz:
he’s
a mob attorney, too. Anyway, he made his mark defending guys like ‘Mad Dog’ Coll and a certain well-known Chicago figure with a scarred face.”

“He defended Al Capone?” Evalyn asked breathlessly.

“Yes. On a triple murder charge. And got him off.”

“I’m sure Sam Leibowitz…” Hoffman began.

But I said: “I’ll tell you one thing about this case, which I learned many years ago—you can’t be
sure
about
anything.
Now. Where do I start?”

The governor shrugged. “Where I did, I guess. With Hauptmann. See for yourself. Talk to Hauptmann.”

It was nightfall by the time I got around to visiting Bruno Richard Hauptmann. I’d spent the afternoon in an office at the Statehouse, going over the material on the case Governor Hoffman had gathered. Evalyn insisted upon coming along, though the governor had made arrangements only for me.

“Tell them I’m your secretary,” she said.

“Even Rockefeller doesn’t have a secretary that looks like you,” I said. “You’re going to have to stow all the ice in your purse.”

She did, only not all of it fit; she had to stuff some of the rocks in the glove compartment. I was driving her car, a black Packard Deluxe Eight convertible, its white top up in the rain. She’d driven from D.C., all by herself. She no longer employed a full-time chauffeur.

“Death row is no place for a lady,” I said.

“In my opinion,” she said, “it’s no place for a man, either.”

The state prison encompassed a full block between Federal and Cass Streets, its massive red stone walls decorated with serpents, rams, eagles and a few kneeling nudes, and studded with guard towers with quaint New England-style cupola roofs. The fortress was haloed in electric light, including opening-night-style moving beams, and loomed ominously against the black, rain-swept night.

“My Lord, what a sight!” Evalyn said.

“Damn near as big as your place on Massachusetts Avenue,” I commented, swinging around onto Third Street. We parked and crossed to the gate, Evalyn taking my arm, wobbling on her heels as we navigated puddle-filled potholes.

We were met at the gate by Warden Kimberling himself, a stocky figure in a black rain slicker, his oblong, fleshy face somber, his wire-frame glasses pearled with raindrops. A prison guard, also rain-slickered, the badge on his cap gleaming with moisture, gestured us along with a flashlight in one hand and a billy club in the other. As ushers go, he was an intimidating one. The rain was coming down hard enough to limit conversation to simple shouted introductions, and the warden and his man led us quickly across a courtyard to the chunky red-brick two-story building nearby that was, I soon realized, the death house.

We stepped into the dark room, and the beam of the guard’s flashlight lit on what at first looked like a ghost, but then, as bright overhead lights were switched on, became a chair. An electric chair, or to be exact,
the
electric chair. The room was surprisingly small, with smudgy whitewashed brick walls and three rows of straight-back folding chairs that faced the sheet-covered hot seat, like a meeting in a little union hall. Only if I were the guest speaker, I wouldn’t sit down after my talk.

“I’m not authorized to allow your secretary to accompany you,” Kimberling said. “But the prisoner’s cell is just across the way. If we leave the door ajar, she can hear your conversation, and take notes or whatever.”

I helped Evalyn out of her fur-collared velvet coat, which was as drenched as a well-used bath towel, and draped it and my raincoat over several of the folding chairs. I left my hat on the seat of one, and got out my notebook and a pencil and led the somewhat shell-shocked Evalyn Walsh McLean to a little wooden bench between the door and the sheeted electric chair.

“I don’t suppose you know speedwriting,” I said, softly.

She managed to crinkle a little smile. “No, but I have a lovely hand.”

“You have a lovely everything,” I said, and she liked hearing that, even after all these years. “But be careful who you show your handwriting specimens to…they might pin the ransom notes on you.”

Warden Kimberling ordered the guard to open the steel grillwork door, and led me through. A few paces and we were standing before the bars of a cell marked “9.” The only occupied cell on this floor.

Hauptmann, wearing a blue-gray open-neck shirt and dark-blue trousers, was on his feet, hands clutching the bars like a guy on death row in a bad movie; he was clearly worked up, his pale triangular face contorted, his eyes haunted. This was not the cool customer I’d been hearing so much about.

“Warden,” he said, his voice tight with desperation, the pitch surprisingly high, “you must do something.”

“Richard,” Kimberling said, not unkindly, “you have a visitor…”

Hauptmann hadn’t even looked at me yet. He stretched an arm out beyond the bars, pointing, pointing up.

“Look,” he said. “Look!”

We looked toward where he gestured; the slanting windows of the large skylight that rose above a second-floor cell-block were getting pelted with rain, the sound echoing softly but distinctly through the corridor. One of the metal-frame windows of the skylight had been cracked open to let air in; the angle was such that no water was dripping down, but there was another problem: a sparrow had got caught between the windows and the wire-mesh-covered iron bars beneath. The bird was trapped in the cell-like area, fluttering its wings, trying aimlessly, frantically, to free itself, beating its tiny wings against the wire.

“Do something, Warden!” he said. Hauptmann was at least as agitated as the bird.

“All right, Richard,” Kimberling said, patting the air, “I’ll put a guard on that. Now calm yourself. You have a visitor.”

Kimberling and the guard immediately moved off, Kimberling pointing up at the skylight, where the bird fought futilely. Maybe he really was going to attend to it.

Meanwhile, Hauptmann was looking at me carefully, suspiciously, like I was a suspect in a lineup; his concern for the bird was replaced by a sudden hardness. “I know you.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve never met, but…”

“You testify against me.”

“Not against you. I just testified.”

“You are Jafsie’s bodyguard pal.”

“Jafsie is not my pal. That I assure you.” I extended my hand. “My name is Heller. Nathan Heller. I’m a private detective. Governor Hoffman has hired me to assist in the investigation to find the truth about this crime you’re accused of.”

His lips formed a faint, wry smile. “‘Accused’ is a wrong word to use, Mr. Heller…but kind.”

“Why don’t you call me Nate?”

“All right.” He extended his hand through the bars. “My name is Richard. Some friends call me Dick. Why don’t you call me that?”

“All right, Dick,” I said.

The press and the prosecution liked to call him Bruno; it made a Teutonic beast of him.

The warden approached as we were shaking hands. He said to Hauptmann, “We’ll take care of that problem,” meaning the bird. He looked at me. “If you need anything, at least one guard will be here at all times.”

“Could you let me in there?” I asked. “I don’t like having these bars between us.”

Kimberling thought for a moment, then nodded, and nodded again, this time to the guard, who turned a key in the cell door and admitted me.

Then the door made its metallic whine and clanged shut behind me and the key turned gratingly and I was locked in with Bruno Richard Hauptmann.

“Won’t you please sit?” Hauptmann said, and he gestured to his cot. I sat and then so did he. Near the cot was a table stacked with newspapers, magazines, various books, among them the Bible and thick paper-covered transcripts of his trial; on the wall behind the cot were pasted various pictures of his wife and his young son. There was a sink and a toilet; it was not a small cell, although tiny compared to one I’d seen Capone in back at Cook County, some years ago.

“I should explain why I’ve been hired,” I said.

“I know why,” he said.

“Has Governor Hoffman mentioned me to you…?”

“No. But you were police official from Chicago who came to work on the kidnapping, in early days.”

“That’s right.”

“So you have knowledge of this case not just anyone have.”

“Well, that is right. You have a good memory.”

He nodded toward the trial transcripts. “I have time for reading. I know much about every witness who spoke for, and against me. I have ask about you. You were in some things involved that the newspapers wrote up. In Chicago.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

“That is good advice, Nate. Do you think Chicago gangsters do this to me?”

That caught me off guard. “Dick—stranger things have happened.”

He smiled. “Strange things happen to me, often.” The sound of the bird fluttering caught his attention. “Excuse,” he said, and rose, and went to the bars and looked out and up. “They do nothing,” he said disgustedly, sitting back down.

“I’d like to hear your side of this, Dick. That’s why I’m here.”

Hauptmann sighed. “Why am
I
here? That is the question I ask myself. Why does the state do to me this? Why do they want my life for something somebody else have done?”

“The court found you guilty…”

“Lies! Lies!” Fire lit the blue-gray eyes, though the face remained strangely placid. “All lies. Would I kill a baby?” He nodded to his son’s picture; the kid looked to be about three years old. “I am a man! A father. And, I am union carpenter. Would I build that ladder?” He laughed; it echoed hollowly in the cell.

“I’ll tell you this much, Dick,” I said. “You were badly represented. That Reilly…”

“Reilly! Could a man do for one million dollars what Reilly have done to me for who-knows-why? Only once, for about five minutes, did he even speak to me about my case.”

“Dick, Reilly wasn’t your lawyer—he was Hearst’s lawyer.” And maybe Al Capone’s.

He began shaking his head emphatically, no. “I did not want to take that Hearst deal—give them ‘exclusive’ on Annie and me. But how could I not? I have no money. The state pay forty thousand dollars to these handwriting men they bring.”

“What
about
the handwriting? Those ransom notes do have some similarities to yours…”

“Mr. Heller—Nate—I think if you have been a man who was picked up with some of the Lindbergh money…even though that money might have passed through ten hands before it came to you…I think that these men would prove, from all your writings, that
you
were the one who have written the ransom letters.”

I nodded; he was right—handwriting experts were shit. “But Dick—some of the misspellings and such, in what you wrote,
were
like some things that turned up in the notes. I saw those notes, Dick—words like ‘boad’ with a ‘d’ and ‘singnature’…”

“They tell me to write exactly as they dictate to me,” he said, quietly indignant. “This include writing words spelled as I was made to spell them.”

Typical.

“This was right after your arrest?”

“Yes. I did not know at the time why specimens of my writing they wanted. If I have any idea, then I would not have let them dictate to me, so to write down
mistakes
.”

“You write English pretty good, do you?”

He shrugged. “Of course I make mistakes in writing. I am immigrant. Still, not such blunders as were dictated to me. Then they took out of my writings those things which looked like the ransom notes. In the note, in the whole damn note left in baby’s room, they found only one little word—‘is’—that they can say look like mine.”

“Did you do these specimens of your own free will?”

“At first. But then I get tired. I can hardly keep my eyes open—but they wake me up, hit me in the ribs, say, ‘You’d better write, it’s bad for you if you don’t! You write, you write…’” His eyes were glazed.

This was more than believable. This was standard operating procedure for cops coast to coast.

“But why did you admit,” I said, having come across this tidbit in the material I examined this afternoon, “that the handwriting in your closet was yours?”

This was the infamous “Jafsie” phone number written on the wainscoting inside a closet in the Hauptmann apartment.

“That is one of the things they have done to me!” He shook his head in stunned frustration. “A few days after my arrest, my Annie and Manfred—my child, my boy, my little Bubi—could stand it no longer. The baby could no longer sleep because of all the police and reporters and people who were there. So Annie and Bubi go to stay with relatives. Now I can see it was the wrong thing to do.”

“Because that gave the cops free access to your apartment.”

“This is right. Some days after I am arrested, when everything seems so mixed up in my mind, the police appear with a board on which is some writing. They say the board is from a closet in my home.”

“Was it?”

“It seem so. They say is this your writing, I say it must be, because it is my custom as a carpenter to write down things on wood. But then they tell me it is Dr. Condon’s phone number! Dear God! If I that number had written and knew what it was, would I have so easy told the police?”

“Maybe not,” I said, with gentle sarcasm.

“With my dying breath I would have said I have never seen that number before! Besides, if I have commit this crime, would I have marked down in my own home this number?”

“Well, I was there when Condon received calls from the supposed kidnappers.”

“But in my Bronx house I have
no
telephone!”

“What?”

“I must go some distance to find telephone to use. What good would to me be a number written inside this closet, very small and very dark, where I would have to get inside to see the number?”

“Wasn’t it an unlisted number?”

“No! They have tried to make people think that this was a secret number. But it is not so. The number was in all the books. It was much later that Dr. Condon changed to a private number. I am certain the numbers on the closet wainscoting have been made either by police or by reporters who try to write like me.”

Thinking back over what I’d read this afternoon, I’d come across an interesting point: the state’s high-paid handwriting experts at the trial were never called upon to identify the closet handwriting as Hauptmann’s.

“I’ve heard a rumor that a specific reporter did that,” I told him. “I intend to try to run that down.”

“Good!” Hauptmann said, and I thought he was answering me at first, but he apparently wasn’t. He was looking past me and up, and standing, as he moved to the cell’s barred doors.

A guard with a long pole was up on the catwalk of the cellblock tier above, trying to lift a skylight window and allow the bird to flutter free.