Stolen Away (39 page)

He snorted. “That’s true. Though it is of no particular significance.”

“Isn’t it? Didn’t the Governor of New Jersey request that you stick around? And help clear up a few discrepancies in your various versions of various events?”

He raised his head. Looked down his nose at me with his vague watery blue eyes. “I had full permission of Attorney General Wilentz to depart on my holiday.”

“I’m sure you did.” I smiled blandly at him. “You might be wondering why I’m still interested in this case, after all these years.”

“Frankly, sir, I am.”

“Well, I’m working for Governor Hoffman now.”

He backed away, stepping into the entrance hall; I half expected him to hold up a cross, as if I were a vampire.

“Sir,” he said, pompously, “during my stay in Panama, I followed all reported developments in the Lindbergh case, and this man Hoffman seems bound and determined to maliciously impugn my character, my motives, my behavior.”

“Really,” I said.

He took a step forward and shook a fist in the air. “I would like to face this Governor Hoffman! I would like to nail these lies of his. I know he would have a good many men there, stronger than I—but even at my age, I can put up a good fight, Detective Heller! I can still handle myself.”

“Come along then. I’ll drive you there.”

His fist dissolved into loose fingers, which he used to wave me off. “Ah, I said I would
like
to. But my womenfolk wouldn’t allow it.”

“Then why don’t you ask me in, and I’ll put the Governor’s questions to you, myself.”

“Detective Heller, I’m afraid I must decline, though I
am
willing to answer the Governor’s questions.”

“You are?”

“Certainly. If they’re submitted in writing.”

“In writing?”

“Yes—and I will of course submit my answers in the same fashion.”

“I see. How about answering just a couple of little questions for me, not in writing? For old times’ sake?”

He smiled in what I’m sure he imagined was a devilish manner. “Perhaps I’ll answer. Go ahead and pose your questions, young man.”

“Did you ever meet Isidor Fisch, when you were hanging around that spiritualist church on One-Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street in Harlem?”

His eyes bugged. He stepped back.

“Or maybe Violet Sharpe, or Ollie Whately? Maybe all four of you sat at the same séance table, one night. By the way, the Marinellis wouldn’t happen to have been students of yours, would they?”

The door slammed in my face.

“Yeah, Jafsie,” I said, “you can still handle yourself,” and joined Evalyn in the car.

Ghent was a tree-shaded residential section of Norfolk, just off the downtown, its narrow brick streets lined with old two-and three-story brick houses, some shoulder-to-shoulder and hugging the sidewalk, others with shamrock-green lawns moist from sheltering boxwood, magnolia and winter-barren crape myrtle. Piercing Ghent was the Hague, a small horseshoe-shaped body of water where skiffs and pleasure craft were moored. Nothing larger could navigate the pondlike harbor. Presumably it connected to the nearby Elizabeth River, but from the rubbery dock where Evalyn and I stood, you couldn’t tell; the funnels and masts of the busy bay were obscured by a bastion of riverfront buildings. The day was cool, the sky overcast, the water, indeed the world, a peaceful but chill gray-blue.

The sign on the central of several white-frame, green-roofed shambling dockside structures said “J. H. Curtis Boat and Engine Corporation.” Not a small operation, but not a large one, either—an obvious step down from the owner’s previous shipbuilding company, which had had among its many customers the German government. It was in that central building, in a modest, glassed-in office (no secretary, no receptionist) looking out on a big cement work area where several boatmen were sanding down the hull of a small racing craft, that we met with Commodore John H. Curtis.

“Mrs. McLean,” Curtis said, standing from a swivel chair at an obsessively neat rolltop desk, grasping the hand she’d extended, “it’s a great pleasure to meet you at last.”

“Thank you, Commodore,” she said. Evalyn wore another black frock, this one trimmed in white and gray, with a white-and-gray pillbox hat; she looked neat enough for a department-store window. “You’re looking well.”

“I feel well,” he said, with a nod of his large head, “all things considered.” And he looked pretty good at that: tall, tanned, rather stout; in his light-brown business suit, his brown-and-yellow tie, he could have stood next to Evalyn in that department-store window. Only the lines around his eyes gave away the stress.

“Thank you for seeing us at such short notice,” I said, and shook hands with the Commodore. He’d put two wood chairs with cushioned seats out, in anticipation of our arrival, and he gestured to them, and we sat, and so did he.

“We seem to have mutual interests, Mr. Heller,” he said, with a friendly but serious smile. Looking at Evalyn, he said, “I feel we have much in common, Mrs. McLean.”

“I believe we do, Commodore,” she said. “I feel we both suffered a certain public…humiliation…as a result of our sincere desire to do good in the Lindbergh tragedy.”

“I’ve been fortunate,” he said, swaying a bit in the swivel chair, “having my family stand behind me. My wife…well, without her, perhaps I would have been lost. But my business is going well, and my personal reputation, here in the Norfolk area, and in the shipping trade in general, remains untarnished.”

“I would assume that means, Commodore,” I said, “that you’d like to put this mess behind you, and get on with your life.”

“I’m getting on with my life quite nicely,” he said, sitting forward, his lips tightening, “but I don’t intend to allow the indignities done to me to stand unredressed.”

“You were accused of being a hoaxer, at first,” I said, “but were tried and convicted for obstructing justice—the state arguing that you aided and abetted the kidnap gang.”

“Yes,” Curtis said, with a mirthless smirk, “by failing to give ‘accurate information’ about them to the authorities.”

“So the State of New Jersey,” Evalyn said, eyes narrowing, “acknowledged that you were in fact in touch with the kidnappers.”

Curtis nodded. “The language of the court was ‘the actual kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby numbering seven or eight, and including a member of the Lindbergh household.’”

Early on, the position of Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch and others was that Violet Sharpe’s suicide was an admission of guilt; by the time of Hauptmann’s trial, that stance had been conveniently forgotten.

“It seems to me,” Evalyn said, her gloved hands folded in her lap, “that if the Hauptmann conviction was correct, your conviction should be set aside, Mr. Curtis…and your record cleared, and the fine you paid refunded.”

“And if
your
conviction was correct,” I said to Curtis, “then Hauptmann’s conviction should be set aside, and he should he a free man again.”

“You might think that,” Curtis said, with a wry, world-weary smile. “It was the same courtroom, one of the same prosecutors…. Did you know that I offered to testify against Hauptmann?”

“I’d heard that,” I said. God, was I glad
he
brought it up. “That’s one of the things I hoped to ask you about.”

The intermittent whine of a power drill in the outer work-area provided an uncomfortable edge to the conversation.

“I told them I thought I could positively identify Hauptman as the ‘John’ I dealt with,” he said, blandly. “There’d been much speculation that ‘Cemetery John’ and the rumrunner John I encountered might be one and the same.”

“Did you recognize Hauptmann?” I asked.
“Was
he your ‘John’?”

“From newspaper pictures and newsreels I’d seen,” Curtis said, “he could have been. I told Wilentz and crew that I would testify against Hauptmann in exchange for full exoneration and the return of the thousand-dollar fine. Schwarzkopf thought it was a swell idea, and couldn’t have cared less if I was telling the truth or not. But Wilentz was afraid to put me on the stand.”

“Why?” Evalyn asked.

“Because my story, the story I’d been telling all along, which
was
true, did not fit the tale
they
were spinning, this fantasy of Hauptmann being a lone-wolf kidnapper.”

Curtis’s yarn, I remembered, involved a large cast of characters, Sam and Hilda and Nils and Eric and Larsen and assorted rumrunners.

“Would you have testified against Hauptmann?” I asked.

“Yes,” Curtis said.

“Even if you didn’t really recognize him?” Evalyn asked, dumbfounded.

“Probably,” he said. “I’m not proud to admit it, Mrs. McLean. But at the time, it looked as though they had so much evidence against Hauptmann, it looked so convincing reading the papers, he seemed so undoubtedly guilty, I didn’t see the harm.”

Evalyn fell into a dark silence.

“I was at wit’s end in those months,” he said. “Several years ago, before my involvement with the Lindbergh case, I suffered a nervous breakdown, having to do with anxiety related to business difficulties. I was very near that point again.”

“That’s another reason they kept you off the stand,” I said bluntly.

“Perhaps. And perhaps they knew there was at least some chance that, face-to-face with Hauptmann in a courtroom, under oath, I might not point the accusing finger at him. I might simply tell the truth. And
my
truth is something the State of New Jersey has never been interested in.”

“You’re saying that had you ID’ed Hauptmann,” I said, “you most likely would’ve withdrawn that identification, in time.”

“Perhaps,” he said, nodding. Then he shrugged. “But perhaps not—had my good name been restored, and my thousand dollars, the better part of valor might have been to fade into respectable obscurity. I can only tell you, truthfully, that today, with my full mental faculties at my command, I would not wrongly testify against that man. Or any man. And having studied the case in some detail—and having had a firsthand view of Jersey justice—I’ve become convinced that poor bastard was railroaded. Pardon my French, Mrs. McLean.”

“Let me back up, just a second,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that now, today, with your ‘full mental faculties’ at your command, you claim the story I heard you tell Lindbergh was true? That you
were
in contact with the kidnappers, or at least with an extortion group that had inside information about the kidnapping?”

“I lied about one thing,” he said, raising a cautionary finger. “I said I’d seen ransom bills—that I was able to check serial numbers. I never did. I embellished the truth, because I was afraid that otherwise Colonel Lindbergh wouldn’t believe me when I said I was in contact with the kidnappers.”

That had been the part of Curtis’s story that had been the most compelling to Lindbergh.

“He seemed reluctant to get involved,” Curtis went on.

“You were there, Mr. Heller, you should remember this. I did it for his own good. To get him off the dime.”

“Otherwise, your story was true.”

“One hundred percent,” Curtis said. His eyes were hard and clear; his voice was the same. “I’m not a liar. I’m an honest man.”

“You were ready to lie about Hauptmann,” Evalyn said. Her eyes were hard, too, in a different way.

“And I lied about the ransom bills,” he admitted, and shrugged again, and sighed. Then he smiled, sadly. “But I’ve been honest with you about both of those things. And I’ve been honest with you about the mental strain I was under.”

“Is that why you confessed?” she asked. “Why you ‘admitted’ everything you’d said was a hoax, when in fact everything you’d said was true?”

“But
not
everything I’d said was true. I was kept awake for days, dragged here and there by the police, not allowed to get a change of clothes, rarely fed, and yes, under great mental strain. After a while, I admitted that one thing: that I hadn’t really seen any ransom money. And that, Mrs. McLean, was when the fun began.”

“I’d like to hear about that,” I said. “But from the beginning.”

Curtis told us how, while on Cape May for a meeting with “Hilda,” his contact with the kidnappers, he’d been informed by phone of the discovery of the body of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., in a shallow grave in the Sourland Mountains. How he had driven at breakneck speed through a rainstorm and arrived at Hopewell at 2:00
P.M
. Here he was questioned, politely, but in a manner that already indicated he was something of a suspect, by Schwarzkopf, Inspector Welch and Frank J. Wilson.

Curtis had suggested they wait for Colonel Lindbergh to arrive, but the interrogators pressed on; he also suggested that if they were going to question him, he ought to have his “memoranda” brought to him—some were in a lockbox in a New York hotel, others were in his bag on the ketch, the
Cachalot,
still more with his secretary in Norfolk. This request was ignored.

He answered the questions to the best of his ability, though he was tired and emotionally wrung-out; and they pressed for auto license numbers, house numbers, phone numbers, none of which he could guarantee the accuracy of without his notes being brought to him.

“When Colonel Lindbergh finally arrived,” Curtis said, “he seemed pleased to see me. You can imagine my relief at seeing a familiar, friendly face. He asked me what I made of this…meaning the discovery of the child in the midst of negotiations for its return from Hilda and Sam and the rest. I said I couldn’t fathom it, and pledged I’d do anything in my power to help. And I suggested if we moved fast, because Hilda and Sam were on land, we could nab them.”

“How did Slim respond?” I asked.

“Very positively,” Curtis said. “But he went into his library with Schwarzkopf and Wilson and did not come back.”

Inspector Welch and various troopers and plainclothes officers, including at times Wilson, questioned him all night, taking a lengthy statement despite his requests that he be allowed to have his notes brought to him for the sake of accuracy. The tone was one of suspicious, insistent interrogation, and Curtis knew he was in deep trouble.

Finally he convinced his captors to take him to Cape May, where he might lead them to the various locations where he’d made contact with the kidnappers. At dawn Inspector Welch and a trooper set out with Curtis in a squad car. Curtis led them to three houses, two of them vacant cottages, one of them occupied by a family named Larsen, the last name of one of the gang. But the Mrs. Larsen who answered the door said she didn’t know any “George Olaf Larsen” and Welch let it go at that.

They were back at the Lindbergh house in Hopewell by nine that night. Welch informed all concerned that the trip had been a waste of damn time and that Curtis was a goddamned liar. Another statement, under increasingly hostile conditions, was forced out of Curtis, who continued to request his notes.

After this, Curtis was driven to the Hildebrecht Hotel in Trenton, where he was registered under a false name and remained essentially a prisoner; he slept three hours, and the next day was spent successfully leading two Newark cops to the Scandinavian neighborhood where one of the meetings had taken place. But he couldn’t lead them to the exact house; he asked them to come back at night, as that was when he’d been driven there. At the Newark police station, he went over mug photo books and found a shot that might have been Nils. The suspect was in custody at Morrisville on another matter, and Curtis would look at him the next day.

That night they returned to the Scandinavian neighborhood, but Curtis could still not zero in on the specific house, and suggested a house-to-house canvas. At the hotel Curtis was sent to bed at 2:30
A.M
. and was woken at 7:00. His requests to have fresh laundry sent from New York were denied, as were his requests to call his family, though he was allowed to shave.

The next day the house-to-house canvas began, without any success, and the suspect at Morrisville was viewed; but the suspect proved noticeably shorter than Nils, despite a strong resemblance. This day, too, ended around 2:30
A.M
., and at 7:00 Curtis was hauled back to Hopewell.

“I wandered all morning around the grounds,” he said. “I was given the silent treatment, except for a few troopers who on the sly gave me a sympathetic comment or two. Some of the troopers seemed sore at Lindbergh for wanting to run the investigation himself. They said they should be at ‘headquarters,’ not in this ‘godforsaken place.’ I wasn’t given anything to eat. Finally a trooper passed the word to me: Schwarzkopf and Welch were planning to arrest me. I asked to talk to Lindbergh. Pretty soon he came out.”