Stolen Away (36 page)

Hauptmann’s hand settled on my shoulder again, less tentatively now. “Nate, I am glad you’re not the pal of Jafsie.”

I laughed. “That old bastard drives me bughouse.”

“He came to see me, you know.”

That threw me. “Here?”

“No. At the cell in Hunterdon County jail. He ask me if I have athletic training. I tell him yes. He ask me if I have won any prizes, and I tell him sixteen or seventeen in Germany for running. Then it look like he was going to cry.”

“He didn’t claim to recognize you?”

“He call me ‘John’ many times, though I correct him. He say if I know anything, I should confess, because there was no connection between the money and the kidnapping, and I would clear myself and himself. He say the police were treating him roughly. But he never said I am the fellow—and when he left, he ask could he come see me again, and I say ‘yes.’ But he never did.”

The door to the death chamber opened and gave us another glimpse of the muslin-covered chair as Warden Kimberling approached, saying, “It’s time, Mr. Heller.”

I stood. Hauptmann and I again shook hands. His eyes, which had been so cold, were warm. His smile was warm.

“I think you might help me,” he said.

“I’m going to try,” I admitted.

“You should believe in God, Nate. I know He will never permit some persons to commit a murder on me.”

“Murders do happen, Dick.”

He laughed, and some bitterness crept back in. “Yes—the poor child have been kidnapped and murdered, so somebody must die for it. For is the parent not the great flier? And if somebody does not die for the death of the child, then always the police will be monkeys.” He shrugged, his smile was a humorless, fatalistic smirk. “So I am the one who is picked out to die.”

There was nothing to say to that. I gave him a tight smile, a little pat on the shoulder, and got the hell out, the door clanking shut behind me.

Evalyn, sitting on the bench, all in black, truly seemed in mourning now; she’d been taking notes, my rich little secretary, the pencil worn to a nub, her face tear-streaked.

She stood, wobblingly, and came into my arms. “That poor man,” she said. “That poor man.”

The warden was looking on from the doorway, uncomfortably.

“Let’s get our coats,” I told her.

From the cellblock, I heard someone say, “Damn.”

I let go of Evalyn and moved toward the warden and stood in the doorway and looked out at Hauptmann, one last time, a white face behind gray bars.

“At least he suffer not long,” he said, looking up.

I stepped out into the corridor and glanced up; and saw the small gray form of the bird motionless against the wire.

This neighborhood, at the far edge of the Bronx, had the small-town flavor of many a big city’s outlying sections. Most of the houses were two-family, two-story wood-and-stucco jobs with neat little lawns, often with a weed-patched vacant lot next door. Hauptmann’s residence—at 1279 East 222nd—was no exception: a two-and-a-half-story frame structure, its second story recessed, a stone wall bordering the front as steps rose gently to a winter-brown lawn dominated by bushes, a vine crawling up the tan stucco in front, toward the second-floor windows, like a cat burglar. At the right of the house was a vacant lot thicketed with weeds, halted at the far right by a rutted country lane, and just across that lane was what remained of the wreckage of the garage Hauptmann had built there. Behind the house, cutting off the lane, were woods, close enough to the house to provide shade, when the leaves returned, anyway.

I parked the Packard in front; Evalyn was with me. She wore a black-and-gray three-piece suit, one piece of which was her topcoat, and a black-and-gray beret. She wore only a few touches of jewelry, at my request—demand, actually, if she were to insist on playing “Thin Man” with me. At least she didn’t bring her goddamn dog.

We had stayed, the night before, in separate suites at the Hotel Sterling, where Hoffman had made reservations for us in the section of the hotel known as the Government House; it had once been the governor’s mansion, so it was fitting in a way. Fancier digs than necessary, but I wasn’t paying.

We had talked into the night, over cocktails in her suite, the death-row confab with Hauptmann weighing heavily on both our minds. If anything romantic or sexual was going to reblossom between us, this was not the time or place or mood. I was curious, however, why Evalyn was still, after four long years, digging into this horrendous fucking case. Hadn’t she been burned badly enough by Gaston Means?

“Nate,” she said, “I’m sorry I failed to get that child back. I’m sorry I was tricked, I’m sorry I was swindled. But I’ll always be glad, in my heart, that there was something that compelled me to try.”

“Fine,” I said, just a little drunk. “Swell. But that wasn’t my question. Why are you still involved?”

She shrugged, and began to ramble in what seemed at first a nonresponsive way. “You know, I had to close down 2020 Massachusetts Avenue—I just couldn’t afford such a big place. And for a time I was in an apartment. Can you picture me in an apartment, Nate? Anyway, a while ago, Ned—my husband, remember him?—as our courtroom battles over custody of the children were continuing, took a bad turn. In terms of his health.”

“Oh? I’m sorry.”

“In terms of his mental health, actually. I’ll never divorce Ned—I won’t have to. There will be no more struggles over custody—the children are damn near grown, and, well…at intervals I get reports from a Maryland hospital concerning a patient there, who has morbid preoccupations and lives in a state of mental exile. Shut off even from himself. If he is addressed by his right name, he grows excited—and swears he is not a McLean.”

“I’m sorry, Evalyn.”

She smiled it off gaily and it was about as convincing as wax fruit. “At any rate, the court awarded me Friendship, the McLean estate, and that was where I was living when the Hauptmann trial was held. I witnessed it from a distance, with some skepticism, as anyone familiar with the facts of the case well might, and afterward, to fill my rich, idle time, I procured the many-volumed transcript of that trial. If it could be called a trial. To me, it was a disgusting hippodrome.”

“And you got interested again.”

“I was always interested,” she said, with a little laugh. “I think I paid for the right to remain interested, don’t you? And I think I have the right to be concerned when someone else is being wronged in this convoluted affair. And the way Mr. Hauptmann is being wronged makes the injustice done me pale in comparison.”

“Your concern for Hauptmann is admirable,” I granted her. “But the possibility remains that he was, in some way or manner, involved in at least the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion caper. He was convincing tonight, but many a guilty man is, where his innocence is concerned.”

“I’m concerned about more than just Hauptmann’s innocence,” she said. Her eyes glittered over her cocktail glass. “I have my doubts about that little skeleton they found in the woods.”

“Well,” I admitted, “after that photo Hoffman showed me, I can see why.”

“Nate, thousands upon thousands of people had combed those woods near the very spot the little body was found. Hell, even the brush
underneath
the body was trampled.”

“Underneath?”

“Only a few feet away, telephone workmen had put up a pole, laying wires, because of the need for extra communcations in those frenzied early days.” Her archness was offset by her sincerity. “Those tiny bones, who’s-ever they were, must have been placed there, long after the fact.”

“Slim’s identification of the body
was
pretty hasty,” I allowed.

She studied her drink, then made a confession: “Well, there was one other person who made an identification.”

That was the first I’d heard of that. “Who in hell?”

“Betty Gow,” she said. “The nurse. She viewed the little body, too, and identified it as Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

“Based on what? There was nothing to identify. I saw the photo…”

“There was a tiny garment under the bones. Betty Gow claimed to recognize it as a little shirt made by her, the night of the kidnapping, to wrap the child in because he had a cold. She claimed she knew it from the thread, the distinctive blue thread she’d used.”

“I see. Still sounds a little thin. But that
is
the most convincing case for those bones being the real child.”

“Yes—but couldn’t that garment have been planted, as well?”

“I suppose…now we’re getting a little overmelodramatic, aren’t we, Evalyn?”

“Are we? Haven’t you always thought someone on the ‘inside,’ with either the Lindbergh or Morrow family staff, was somehow in on the crime?”

“Yes. So, what? You’re saying Betty Gow might have lied, or helped plant that little shirt…”

“Not necessarily. The cloth and the thread were provided to Betty Gow, the night of the kidnapping, by the butler’s wife—Elsie Whately.”

The Hauptmann apartment took up the second floor of the house, a mostly empty five rooms for which Evalyn had been paying, since December, fifty dollars a month to the seventy-year-old widow who lived below.

As I wandered the empty rooms I remembered reading of the new, rather expensive furniture the Hauptmanns owned, which had seemed so suspicious to the cops and prosecutors. A walnut bedroom suite, an ivory crib, a floor-model radio in a nice walnut veneer cabinet—all gone, sold to help pay for the defense effort. Now there was nothing in this apartment but the bare floors, faded wallpaper and our echoing footsteps.

“As many people as have been through here,” I said, “I don’t know what I expected to find.”

Evalyn had been following me like a dutiful puppy through the small living room, the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the bath. “It doesn’t seem to me,” she said, “that the Hauptmanns were living in the lap of luxury.”

“It doesn’t even seem that way to me,” I said, “although this is about right for a man operating a little contracting business…dabbling in the stock market in a minor, amateur way…his wife working full-time as a waitress in a bakery. About right. Let’s look in those famous closets, shall we?”

In what had been the nursery, I found the closet where the wainscoting had been removed to show the jury the “evidence” of Jafsie’s phone number having been written there. Last night I’d told Evalyn what I had heard about the reporter on the
Daily News
named Tim O’Neil who’d reputedly created this evidence for a headline. She’d been suitably outraged, and wondered if we shouldn’t “look this fellow up.” I said we should.

In the ceiling of what had apparently been a linen closet, off the hall, was the access panel to the attic.

“I’d better make this trip by myself,” I advised Evalyn, who had one look inside and agreed. I handed her my suit coat.

To get to the attic hatch, I had to take the shelves down, stack them out in the hall, and scale the shelving cleats like some half-ass mountain-climber.

“Careful!” she said.

“Hauptmann must’ve needed that one scrap of lumber pretty goddamn bad,” I said, breathing hard, plastered to the closet wall like a bug, “to go looking for it up here.”

Balancing awkwardly, clutching a cleat with one hand, I pushed the trapdoor-like panel up with the other, then hoisted myself up through the tiny opening—perhaps fifteen inches square. The attic was a dark, musty, dusty inverted V that would make a midget claustrophobic.

I hung my head down the hatch where an eager-eyed Evalyn looked up from the linen closet. “See if the landlady has a flashlight,” I said.

“There’s one in the car.”

“Get it.”

I waited, still hanging over the open space—the air was better there—and thought about pudgy Governor Hoffman having to squeeze up through this space, which he had on at least one occasion. That was worth a smile.

Soon she handed me up the flashlight, standing on her toes to do it, and I got a better look at what turned out to be an unfinished attic. The flooring only went down the middle, with the joists, laths and plaster below bared at either side where the roof sloped low.

With the beam of the flashlight, it didn’t take long to spot the one floorboard that was half the length of the others—the one from which Hauptmann had supposedly sawed the wood for a rail of the kidnap ladder. It was also easy to spot what made that evidence smell: from the apex of the roof, there were thirteen boards on one side, fourteen on the other.

The fourteenth was the odd board out, and not just because it was the half-board: without it, the attic would have been symmetrical, a better, more likely carpenter job. The other boards had seven nails fastening them to the joists; the half-board, twenty-five.

I handed Evalyn down the flash, then lowered myself and dropped, shaking the floor as I landed. I told Evalyn what I’d seen.

“I understand there were something like thirty-five cops up there,” she said, with a disgusted smirk, “before anybody ‘noticed’ that extra, sawed-in-half floorboard.”

“One more closet to check,” I said, getting back into my suit coat. “I want to see the most famous Hauptmann closet of all: where Fisch’s shoebox was stowed.”

In the kitchen, the closet’s single shelf didn’t seem terribly high; this had been a broom closet—the hook where Mrs. Hauptmann had hung her apron was still there. Evalyn, short as she was, could almost reach the shelf, where the Fisch box had been kept, supposedly out of view from Anna Hauptmann.

“I don’t get it,” I said, looking at this low-flying shelf. “Wilentz made Hauptmann’s wife look sick on the stand, because she admitted she kept a Prince Albert tobacco can on the edge of that shelf…she kept soap coupons and such in there, and she talked about being barely able to reach it.”

“Then Wilentz showed photos and introduced data proving the shelf was lower than Anna claimed,” Evalyn said.

It had been a bad moment for Mrs. Hauptmann.

“Why would she lie about something so easily proven? Let’s have a closer look…”

I removed the single shelf. Then I shined the flashlight on the wall.

“That’s funny,” I said. “This closet’s been painted recently.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think the others have.” We went back for a second look; and, no, the other closets had well-aged paint jobs, even to the point of chipping and peeling.

I went back to the kitchen closet and ran my hand over that wall like a blind man reading a book in Braille.

“Jesus!” I said. “Give me that flashlight again!”

She did.

“This closet
has
been painted recently—but up here…” And I cast the flashlight beam up six inches above the shelf cleats. “…there’s an area where the paint indents.”

“Indents?”

“Yeah. There are layers and layers of paint on these walls, paint on paint on paint. Over the years, when this closet has been repainted, nobody bothered to take the shelf out. Just painted walls and shelf alike.”

“Yes. But…what…?”

“Well, up here,” I said, reaching, running my finger from left to right along the wall the width of the shelf, “the paint is only a coat or two deep. Let me show you.”

I lifted her by her tiny waist so she could run her fingertips along there herself. “You’re right! Nathan, you’re right…”

I set her down. “Get your criminologist back in here,” I said. “With the right chemicals, he can prove that shelf was moved. I think he can find where those cleats were originally attached, too, and filled in the meantime with putty, and painted over. Originally, that shelf was right where Anna Hauptmann said it was.”

“Then she really
couldn’t
have seen the shoebox!”

“No she couldn’t. The cops lowered the shelves, to make her look like a liar.”

Evalyn’s look of joy dissolved into a scowl. “Those bastards. Those bastards!”

I shrugged. “Police work,” I said.

From the other room, a male voice called, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”

“In here,” Evalyn called,

“You expecting somebody?” I asked.

She nodded. She had a coy, little smile; cat that ate the canary.

A tall, skinny bespectacled guy about thirty with pleasant, angular features, wearing a lumpy fedora and a rumpled raincoat under which a blue bow tie peeked, came strolling in. He was blond with a wispy mustache and a smirk.

“You’re Mrs. McLean?” he said, grinning, taking off the hat.

“That’s right,” she said, extending a gloved hand. “Thank you for coming, Mr. O’Neil.”

“O’Neil?” I said.

She nodded, smiling at me. “I took the liberty of asking Mr. O’Neil to stop by. Called him this morning from the hotel. I told him we had an exclusive for him on the Hauptmann case.”

“You’re Tim O’Neil, with the
Daily News
?” I asked.