Stolen Away

27

My new client, Governor Hoffman-or to be more exact, the State of New Jersey-wired me enough for a Pullman sleeper compartment, but I bought an upper berth instead and made an extra twenty bucks and change on the deal. It was the Twentieth Century Limited, that fabled fancy streamliner, which would shoot me nonstop overnight to New York, where shortly after an onboard breakfast I’d grab a less sleek train and backtrack to Trenton.

Before retiring, however, I spent some time in the dining car-the prime rib was not as good as the roast beef at the Stockyard’s Inn, but the meal was on the State of New Jersey, so what the hell. Later I loitered in the lounge car, which was all chrome and mirrors and diffused lighting and, thankfully, liquor. It would have been nice to run into a beautiful lonely woman traveling alone; but I didn’t. I figured a couple Bacardi cocktails would help me get over it, or anyway sleep better; but they didn’t.

Even the lulling lurch of the Limited and the soothing blackness of the Pullman berth didn’t put me to sleep. My mind was moving faster than the train. Partly it was worry-thinking about Nitti and Ricca and where I might end up if Ricca deposed Nitti, at some point, like tomorrow.

But mostly I was carried back to a similar trip I’d taken on the taxpayers of New Jersey, not that much over a year before, in January of ’35. I’d gone the upper-berth route that time, too-meaning I’d bilked New Jersey a little better than forty bucks on train rides alone. And they paid for a night’s lodging-the Union Hotel in Flemington, where the trial was held-plus thirty-five bucks per diem, which added up.

A certain irony was not lost on me. Last year, the State of New Jersey had paid me, generously, to help put Hauptmann in the electric chair. This year, the State of New Jersey was treating me with like generosity to help keep Bruno from sitting down.

And the state had certainly spared no expense in the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, even when it came to shipping in a minor witness like me from Chicago. And why not? It had been one hell of a show-a regular Broadway production, even if it had been mounted in a one-horse town.

Flemington, sixty-some miles from New York, was a roost for chicken-and-egg farmers, a village of less than three thousand Lums and Abners in the rolling hills of Hunterdon County, home of the Lindbergh estate. The little county seat suddenly had a big trial in its lap, and by New Year’s Day had become host to sixty thousand “foreigners”-sightseers, reporters, telephone and telegraph technicians, swarming Main Street, clogging the roads all the way back to New York and Philadelphia.

The courthouse was a stately two-and-a-half-story whitewashed stucco affair with four big pillars out front and a small, modern jail building in back. In that smaller building resided the illegal alien Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Around Christmas some compassionate locals had sung him carols outside his barred window; lately, tourists had been repeating less cheery chants, among them “Burn the kraut!” and “Kill Hauptmann!”

Hauptmann, arrested in the Bronx, had been extradited to New Jersey because in New York the only crime he could be tried for was extortion: in Jersey, he could be tried for kidnapping and murder. Attorney General David Wilentz, by defining the kidnapping as a “burglary”-hadn’t the kidnapper broken and entered, and “stolen” the child away? — could in that convoluted fashion charge Hauptmann with murder. Burglary was a felony, and any killing during the commission of a felony, whether that death was accidental or intentional, was of course murder. Kidnapping could have brought a sentence of as little as five years. Wilentz and the world wanted a death sentence for Hauptmann.

From what I’d read in the papers, Hauptmann probably deserved it, though this “lone-wolf kidnapper” stuff never rang true to me. I said as much to Colonel Henry Breckinridge, who picked me up early that morning at Grand Central Station and with me made the incredibly slow journey (with snow-narrowed roads and impossible traffic, at times three miles an hour) to the Flemington courthouse.

“I can’t say I buy that theory, either,” Breckinridge said guardedly, studying the bumper of the buggy in front of him like a legal brief he was considering. “But my understanding is, Wilentz hasn’t the right sort of evidence to prove a conspiracy, so…”

“They’re targeting the guy they have,” I said, shrugging, “using what evidence they do have. Makes sense. Have you testified yet?”

“No. But I will. It’s early yet. This is only the fifth day.”

“I saw in the papers that Wilentz put the Lindberghs on the stand, first.”

“Yes.”

Breckinridge seemed vaguely troubled.

“Must’ve been hard on Anne,” I said.

He nodded gravely. “She stood up well. When the prosecutor handed her the little garments to identify…it was a tragic goddamn thing, Heller. Count yourself lucky you didn’t have to witness it.”

I nodded back noncommittally. “How did Slim do?”

“Fine.” He turned his eyes quickly away from the road. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I said. “I understand he’s attending the trial, each day.”

“Yes, he is.”

“What, is he staying over at Englewood?”

“That’s correct. He and Anne both, though she hasn’t returned to court, and has sense enough not to.”

“Colonel, what’s bothering you?”

“Why, nothing.”

“What, you don’t think it’s unfair to the defendant, do you, for a martyred public figure like Lindy to be sitting in court? Where the jury can see him all the time?”

Breckinridge shook his head, no, but it wasn’t very convincing. He was Slim’s friend, but he was also a fair man, and a lawyer. And I knew, from what I’d read, that other aspects of Slim’s performance on the stand might bother Breckinridge, as well.

For one thing, Slim had denied using his political influence to have federal officers “lay off” certain aspects of the case; and for another, he had denied that he ever expressed the opinion that a “gang,” as opposed to a single-o like Hauptmann, had kidnapped his son.

These were minor lies, even mere shadings of the truth you might say; no big deal. However…

Lindbergh had also, on the stand, without hesitation, positively identified Hauptmann as the man in St. Raymond’s Cemetery. Strictly on the basis of recognizing his voice. He had, after all, heard “Cemetery John” shout, “Hey, Doctor!”

The notion that a man could positively identify another man by having heard him say two words, four years before, was thin enough. But I remembered what Slim had said, the very night of the ransom drop, when Elmer Irey asked him in the Morrow apartment in Manhattan, if he could identify Cemetery John by his voice.

“To say I could pick a man out by that voice,” he’d said, “I really couldn’t.”

Yet Breckinridge knew, and I knew, and Slim had to know, that the weight of Lucky Lindy providing “eyewitness identification” (make that ear-witness) would probably be all it would take to slam that German’s ass in the chair. This trial, I knew with little doubt, was already over.

Flemington, even choking with outsiders, was a village not without a Currier and Ives charm in this, its winter of fame: white wood-frame cottages with green shutters behind neat wooden fences, modest yards blanketed white, shade trees grayly skeletal, gaily decorated with ice; a modest downtown where the flat rooftops of two-and three-story brick buildings wore white mantles. In the streets, however, the snow had turned black and slushy, and on the sidewalks was hard-packed under thousands of imported trampling feet.

Breckinridge dropped me off, as his car crawled along Main Street, leaving me while he went off to some distant designated parking area. I waded through the humanity (make that “humanity”) where gawkers mingled with souvenir salesmen on the courthouse steps. Some pretty classy merchandise was being hawked-miniature kidnap ladders, ten cents each, in several sizes (one nifty little number you could pin on your shirt or lapel), autographed photos of Charles and Anne Lindbergh with shaky, suspicious signatures and little bagged clumps of the late baby’s hair, sold by a salesman who seemed to be prematurely balding in odd, patchy ways.

Newsreel cameramen, perched with their spidery contraptions atop cars, were churning at me; reporters attacked me like bees, some with notepads, others with microphones, asking me if I was anybody. I told them I wasn’t and pressed my way inside. I showed my color-coded pass to one of several New Jersey troopers at the door, hung up my topcoat and took my hat with me up the winding stairs. I came into a big, square, high-ceilinged courtroom, with pale yellow walls and a lot of humidity-misted windows; at right was the jury box, an American flag pinned to the wall behind it, and between the judge’s bench and the jury was a simple wooden chair for witnesses. Behind the judge’s bench, high up, beneath Grecian trim, was the county seal, depicting a stalk of golden corn.

Right now this spartan chamber was as noisy as a stadium before the big game. Hundreds of spectators were seated in churchlike pews and several hundred more were squeezed in on folding chairs, while the rear balcony was crammed with reporters, perhaps a hundred and fifty of the fifth estate’s finest, working at cramped, makeshift pine-board writing desks.

Among the spectators were celebrities: Clifton Webb, Jack Benny, Lynn Fontanne, and fat, effete Alexander Woollcott, who seemed svelte compared to rumpled, mustached Elsa Maxwell, that pear-shaped matron of cafe society, leading a pack of ladies in mink, bringing to mind that the mink is a member of the weasel family and that the female of that species is particularly bloodthirsty.

The crowded press box included familiar names and faces, as well: Walter Winchell, who in his syndicated column had long ago pronounced Hauptmann guilty; novelist Fannie Hurst; columnist Arthur Brisbane, who had given Capone so much publicity in the early days of the case; Damon Runyon; Adela Rogers St. Johns; and on and on….

I took all this in as another New Jersey State cop, acting as an usher, led me to a seat behind the prosecution’s bench; a small piece of paper was taped to the empty folding chair, saying HELLER. Next to my folding chair, in another, sat Slim Lindbergh. His baby face had aged, but he still looked boyish; he was dressed in a neat gray three-piece suit-without a ladder pinned to the lapel.

I nodded to him and smiled a little and he returned the nod and the smile; he didn’t stand, but as I sat, he offered a hand, which I shook.

“Good to see you again, Nate,” he said, over the din. “Sorry I’ve been such a stranger.”

“Hi, Slim. Why are you putting yourself through this? You’ve testified.”

“I have to be here,” he said solemnly.

He nodded toward the prosecution’s table; whether by that he meant they’d requested his presence, I couldn’t say.

David Wilentz, the Attorney General, who had decided to try this case himself-because of political aspirations, the cynical said, myself among them-turned to greet me with a Cheshire-cat smile and an outstretched hand. His grip was fist-firm and his dark, smart eyes locked onto me the same way.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, “thank you for coming. Sorry we haven’t had a chance to talk.”

“Glad to help,” I said, as he released my hand.

He was a small, dark, thin-faced man with a long, thin, sharp nose and glossy, slicked-back black hair; about forty, he looked a little like George Raft, only more intelligent and shiftier. He wore a dark-blue business suit, expensively tailored, with a slash of silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. This was a guy who would never go hungry.

“Just stick to the facts,” he said. “Don’t offer anything.”

I nodded. I’d spoken on the telephone, long-distance, to a prosecutor named Hauck, so they knew what to expect. Wilentz turned his back to me and began whispering among his fellow prosecutors.

From my seat I could see the defense table pretty well, and the person who commanded the most attention was the chief defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. Decked out in a black cutaway coat with a white carnation in its buttonhole, gray striped trousers and spats, the massive, fleshy attorney cut an unintentionally comic figure; in his mind he was Adolphe Menjou, but in reality he was W. C. Fields, right down to the thinning sandy hair and alcohol-ruddy complexion. His round, thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses gave him a further vaudeville touch.

In the papers, Reilly was reported as having two nicknames: the “Bull of Brooklyn,” in reference to his younger days, when he was one of New York’s most successful trial attorneys; and, more recently, “Death House” Reilly, because that was where clients of his charged with murder had been consistently ending up lately. Fifty-two (looking twenty years older), Reilly was well past his prime, and I wondered how the defendant got stuck with him.

Directly behind Reilly sat his client. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was surprisingly nondescript, a skinny, wide-shouldered man in a gray-brown suit that looked big for him. His eyes were light blue, and blank; he seemed to rarely blink, rarely to move, sitting erect and staring, not so much morose as indifferent. His hair was blond, his cheekbones high and wide, his cheeks sunken, his face an oval, his features rather handsome, and decidedly Teutonic.

The other defense lawyers (and it was only later that I learned their names) included stocky young C. Lloyd Fisher, who had (unsuccessfully) defended Commodore Curtis in this very courtroom; bespectacled, shrimpy Frederick Pope; and beak-nosed, slouchy Egbert Rosecrans. Dapper Prosecutor Wilentz and his businesslike associates were a sharper-looking bunch by far.

Bells echoing in the tower above rang the hour-ten o’clock-and the white-haired court crier announced, “Oyez, oyez, oyez! All manner of persons having business with this court on this eighth day of January in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-five, let them draw nigh, give their attention and be heard.”

The judge-Justice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard-emerged from a door behind his dais, black robes flowing; his dark hair gone mostly white, his small mustache too, he had a dignified but just vaguely unkempt demeanor, like a harried country doctor.

Soon a parade of witnesses began, police witnesses initially, and it wasn’t particularly riveting stuff. Elsa Maxwell and her minks chatted amongst themselves, and occasionally the judge would sternly remind the courtroom to mind its manners.

Wilentz was smooth as a polished stone, but Reilly-who was trying to make the New Jersey police look like buffoons, which shouldn’t have been that tough-was a ham actor, bouncing his voice off the rafters.

The red-flannel-faced defender did score a few points: he got a fingerprint man to admit never having even heard of the Bertillon system, and got across the ludicrously shoddy police work of the initial investigation by getting two cops to say each thought the other was going to take a plaster cast of the footprint beneath the child’s window.

Then Wilentz got away from the police witnesses and put a frail, bearded, eighty-seven-year-old codger named Amandus Hochmuth on the stand. Hochmuth, who lived on the corner of Mercer County Highway and Featherbed Lane, claimed he’d seen Hauptmann driving a “dirty green” car on the morning of March 1, 1932. He remembered this because Hauptmann had “glared” at him.

“And the man you saw looking out of that automobile, glaring at you,” Wilentz said, “is he in this room?”

“Yes!”

“Where is he?”

“Alongside that trooper there,” Hochmuth said, and as he pointed a wavering finger at Hauptmann, the courtroom lights went out.

“It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness!” Reilly shouted in the near-darkness.

The courtroom exploded in laughter. Slim didn’t smile next to me, and I didn’t either, because Reilly’s style bored me; and Judge Trenchard rapped his gavel and threatened the gallery again.

The lights came up within a couple minutes, and Wilentz directed Hochmuth to step down and identify the man he’d seen, and, slow, wobbly, the witness did so, pointing a trembling finger at Hauptmann, and then actually placing a hand on Hauptmann’s knee, fearfully, as if he might get burned.

The defendant shook his head three times and with a bitter smile said to the woman behind him (his wife Anna, I wondered?): “Der Alte ist verruckt.”

Next to me, Slim said softly, “What was that?”

I whispered back: “He said, ‘The old man is crazy.’”

Then florid defender Reilly had a crack at the old man, and did get him to confess his eyes weren’t perfect, but otherwise couldn’t budge the old boy.

Next came several witnesses, including a Forest Service technologist, who Wilentz attempted to use to introduce evidence about the kidnap ladder. But Reilly and his associate Pope managed to block it; the ladder had been “altered” and passed between various “hands of people not identified by the prosecution.”

Following this came a familiar face, though I confess I didn’t recognize him at first. The ferret-faced cab driver, Perrone, who had delivered the envelope to Jafsie’s house the night of the first cemetery rendezvous, made an eyewitness ID of Hauptmann as the man who gave him the envelope. He got off the stand and placed a hand on Hauptmann’s shoulder and said, “This is the man.”

Hauptmann curled a lip and said, “You’re a liar.”

Reilly went after Perrone with a sledgehammer. He bullied the cab driver about being on relief; tested his memory about other passengers he’d had the same night; implied he’d been bought and coached by the prosecution. The tactic backfired: the courtroom hated Reilly by the time the badgering was over.

Then it was my turn. I was questioned by Wilentz about driving Condon to Woodlawn Cemetery for the first of the two “Cemetery John” encounters. I told of what I’d seen, which included the guy jumping off the cemetery gate and running into Van Cortlandt Park, Condon following him to a bench by the shack where they sat and talked. Told all of it.

Almost all of it. There was one question, a rather key question, I wasn’t asked by the slick Wilentz.

“Buy you lunch, Nate?” Slim asked, and I said sure, as we exited the courtroom for the noon break; we both had to damn near shout, because the courtroom was still buzzing.

“Union Hotel dining room okay?” Lindy asked, breath smoking in the chill air, as we pushed through a crowd that was cheering and clapping at the sight of the Lone Eagle; newsreel cameras churned and reporters called out questions-none of it registering on Slim, who carried around with him his own quiet at the center of the storm.

“Hotel dining room’s swell,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Right there,” he said, nodding across the way. “That’s where you’re staying.”

We moved through the car-choked street; onlookers called out to Lindy who at times bestowed them a tight glazed smile, and very occasionally a nod. He seemed oblivious to the grisly goods being hawked, the little ladders and such; but he couldn’t have been.

The Union Hotel was a lumbering red-brick affair with ugly gingerbread work detailing a sprawling porch over which lurked double-deck balconies. Out front a chalk sandwich board listed the fare in the dining room: Lamp Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, Lindbergh Sundaes, among others.

The dining room was bustling, but a few tables were reserved for celebrities like Slim and the prosecution and defense teams. Colonel Breckinridge, who hadn’t made it into the courtroom, was waiting for us at an isolated table off to one side.

As we sat down, Breckinridge asked Lindbergh how the trial was going today, and he said, “Fine.”

I said, “Reilly strikes me as the prosecution’s biggest asset.”

“How so?” Breckinridge asked.

“Well, that swallowtail coat and spats getup isn’t exactly endearing him to that down-home jury. Or his loud, bullying style. He’s about as subtle as John Barrymore half-in-the-bag.”

A waiter handed us menus and Lindbergh examined his with unblinking eyes, his expression not unlike the one the defendant had been wearing in court.

The middle-aged, potbellied waiter, though busy, stood attentively by while we read the menu and ordered at leisure; Lindbergh wasn’t just any customer, after all.

“What are the ‘Hauptmann Fries’?” I asked him.

“German fried potatoes,” he said blandly.

Lindbergh ordered vegetable soup and a hard roll; Breckinridge had the Lamb Chops Jafsie; and I had the Gow Goulash (named for Betty, the nurse, who’d come from Scotland to testify a few days before).

While we waited for our lunches, I said, “I notice Wilentz didn’t ask me about that suspicious guy I saw walk by Jafsie and me, at the cemetery.”

“Oh?” Breckinridge said.

Lindy said nothing.

“Must not fit his no-conspiracy thesis,” I said. “Slim, did he ask you about the guy you saw?”

“What guy?” Slim asked.

“The guy you saw on your cemetery jaunt. Could’ve been the same guy I saw on mine.”

Lindbergh shrugged.

“Come on, Slim-it probably was the guy I saw. Walked by with a stoop, covering his face with a hanky, swarthy fella?”

“Just some bystander,” he said.

“Oh, it’s just a coincidence, we both saw, on our two separate trips, at our two separate cemeteries, a stooped-over wop covering his face with a hanky, while he walked by checking us out? Slim. Please.”

Lindbergh said, rather tightly, “Let Wilentz do his job.”

I sat forward; silverware clinked. “Why didn’t Wilentz ask me anything about my real role in the case? There was nothing about Capone, or Marinelli and Sivella mentioning the name ‘Jafsie’ before Condon was on the scene, or Curtis or Means or…”

“That is not,” he said crisply, “the focus of this trial. Let it go.”

“Let it go? Maybe Reilly won’t let it go, Slim.”

His mouth twitched irritably. “Just use common sense on the stand, Nate. All right?”

“Common sense?”

Our food arrived; I waited till everybody was served and the waiter was gone. The Gow Goulash looked tomatoey and was steaming hot and smelled good.

“Common sense,” I repeated. “You mean, lie on the stand?”

Lindbergh glared at me, but said nothing.

Breckinridge said, “No one is suggesting that, Heller, certainly.”

I took a bite of the goulash; it tasted as good as it looked. Damn near as good as Betty Gow looked, for that matter.

“You know, gents,” I said reflectively, “I’m from Chicago, and in many respects I’m your typical low-life greedy Chicago cop. Of course I’m private now, and part of why I left the department is that some people assumed I was for sale at any price. I’m not.”

“No one is suggesting…” Breckinridge began, nervously.

“There’s a lot of things I’ll do for money, or even just the hell of it. But I make it a point not to lie on witness stands.”

Lindbergh was looking at his soup as he spooned it; eating quickly, for him.

“You remember that gun I loaned you, Slim? The one you took to the cemetery that night?”

He nodded, but he didn’t look at me.

“I lied on the witness stand, once. The cops and the mob had a patsy picked out. It was even okay with the patsy-he was in on the fix. I didn’t see the harm of going along with it. So I lied on the witness stand.”

Lindbergh touched his lips with a napkin.

“It got me ahead,” I said, shrugging. “It’s how I got to be the youngest plainclothes officer on the goddamn Chicago police. But it rubbed my father the wrong way. Old union guy that he was. Stuffy about things like that, like telling the truth under oath. Funny-he didn’t even believe in God, yet if they put him under oath, he couldn’t have told anything but the truth. Anyway. That gun I loaned you, he killed himself with it. My gun. Since then, I’ve been fussy about what I say on witness stands.”

Slim said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“That wasn’t my point.”

“I know what your point is. I don’t appreciate being called a liar.”

“Is that what I did?”

He looked at me hard; sighed. “Nate, this man is guilty.”

“I heard you say you couldn’t identify ‘Cemetery John’ by his voice. You told the same thing to a Bronx grand jury, not so long ago. What changed?”

He gestured with a pointing finger. “I have been assured by the top police officials in this case that there is no doubt about Hauptmann’s guilt. I have heard this from Schwarzkopf, from Frank J. Wilson, from Lt. Finn, from…” He shook his head, as if clearing cobwebs. “If you were able to sit in that courtroom every day, as I have, and as I will, you’d find that out.”

“Slim, I was a cop. I am a cop. And I can tell you one thing about cops: once a cop decides a guy is guilty, that guy is guilty. And a cop will, at that juncture, get real inventive. More tampered-with and manufactured evidence, and coached and purchased witness testimony, has been presented in American courtrooms than any other kind. Trust me.”

“I wish you would, Nate.”

“What?”

“Trust me.”

“Well.” I smiled; dabbed my own face with a napkin. “I will let you buy me lunch. I’m not that proud.”

We smiled at each other, warily, Slim and I, but Breckinridge was disturbed by all this.

After lunch I was called back on the stand and Reilly had at me. I thought, for a moment, he was getting to the heart of it.

He was asking me, in his high-handed ham-actor fashion, about the night we prepared the replica ballot box of ransom money for Jafsie and Slim to deliver to Cemetery John.

“Didn’t you think it would be a good idea to go along and capture that person?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did the Police Department of the city of New York, and the Department of Justice, know there was going to be a ransom payment that night?”

“I believe so. At least, the Treasury Department did.”

“Did they know where the payment would be made?”

“No. Nobody knew that. Colonel Lindbergh and Professor Condon didn’t know, until they got to the florist’s shop, as the note directed them.”

“You’re referring to the note delivered by the taxicab driver?”

“Yes.”

“Were the police notified, at that time? That the note had arrived, and that Dr. Condon and Colonel Lindbergh were off to make their payment?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Mr. Heller, weren’t you at the time a police officer yourself?”

“Yes. But with the Chicago Police. Just a liaison, an adviser, on this case.”

“And you don’t know why the New York Police, or the Justice or Treasury Departments, were not notified that the ransom payment was about to be made?”

“No, sir, I don’t. I wasn’t one of the big chiefs in this. I was just a dot on the ‘i.’”

That got a laugh; both Lindbergh and Hauptmann smiled, strangely enough, though Judge Trenchard didn’t. He rapped his gavel, demanded order, threatening to clear the courtroom.

“Mr. Heller,” Reilly said, a hand on his ample side, “as a police officer, did you make any effort to follow and protect Dr. Condon and the Colonel, that night?”

“No.”

Reilly smiled and looked tellingly at the jury. He’d made a point, however vaguely; but then he dismissed me!

I shuffled off to my chair, next to Lindbergh, who patted my arm supportively. My head was reeling. Shit, Reilly didn’t ask me about the stooped swarthy hanky-over-the-face guy I saw; or the Capone connection; or the spiritualists; or Means or Curtis or fucking anything. Some of it he may just not have known. But a good deal of it had gotten into police reports and the press, in the aftermath of the ransom scam and the Means and Curtis hoaxes.

The next witness was called: “Dr. John F. Condon.”

The great man had apparently just arrived, as he made a grand entrance from the back of the room.

Old Jafsie walked slowly, solemnly, to the witness chair, a tall, paunchy figure in circuit-preacher black with a crisp white hanky in a breast pocket and an old-fashioned gold watch chain draped across his breast.

Wilentz asked the witness for his age and place of residence, and Jafsie answered in a tremulous, yet booming voice, “I am seventy-four years of age, and a resident of the most beautiful borough in the world, the Bronx.”

I groaned, and Lindbergh flashed me a sideways glance.

Wilentz asked for more background, and Jafsie began a yawn-inducing tale of the story of his life; I was just dropping off to sleep, when Wilentz asked him how he and Colonel Lindbergh happened to meet a man at St. Raymond’s Cemetery on the night of April 2, 1932.

“And didn’t you have with you,” Wilentz pressed on, “a box of money?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you give that money in a box to someone that night?”

“I did, sir.”

“Who did you give that money to?”

“John.”

Wilentz turned significantly to the jury. “And who is John?”

Condon turned slightly in his chair to look toward the defendant. He pointed a finger like a gun at Hauptmann and said, so loud his voice rang in the room, “John is Bru-no…Rich-ard…Haupt-mann!”

The court was up for grabs, the woman I took to be Mrs. Hauptmann looking at her husband with grave concern, Hauptmann himself looking stunned, defense counsel Fisher gripping Hauptmann’s shoulder supportively, the gallery gasping and then jabbering, chairs scooting as news messengers scurried out.

I got up, too.

Lindbergh touched my arm and said, “Nate? You all right?”

“I’ve heard enough, Slim,” I said, not unkindly, and went out.

That night, in the Union Hotel, I sat and drank and watched chief defense attorney Reilly laugh it up with reporters, a bosomy blonde “secretary” on either arm, drinking his red face redder. The next morning Breckinridge drove me back to Grand Central Station, where I caught the Limited. Breckinridge and I hadn’t spoken much on the ride. A little small talk; the weather had turned foggy and wet-we talked about that.

At one point he did say, “Don’t judge Slim too harshly.”

It was a reasonable request, and I nodded, but I remember wondering if anybody on earth, besides Hauptmann’s wife Anna, would grant the accused that same simple plea.

Now, over a year later, riding the Limited east once again, snug in my upper berth, I wondered if maybe, finally, somebody had.