Stolen Away

29

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.

Hauptmann came back and sat down, looking relieved. “It’s not free, but he’s trying. Someone is trying. That’s important. Where were we?”

“You mentioned the police had access to your apartment, because your wife and son moved out. Is that your reading of so-called rail sixteen, the piece of the ladder that’s supposed to come from your attic?”

He smiled mirthlessly, shook his head. “In the first place, this ‘rail sixteen’ have in it some large knots which alone would prevent a carpenter from making a ladder of it. Only it is not a ladder-it is a bad wooden rack. Its construction shows that it did not come from the hand of a carpenter, not even a poor one. Wilentz, he say I am not a good carpenter. I have worked for myself and as a foreman. You ask people about whether I am a good carpenter.”

“You think the wood was from your attic?”

He shrugged. “If so, they take it, not me.”

The kidnap ladder had been dismantled and reassembled time and again, for various tests.

“Wilentz says I am smart criminal,” Hauptmann said, with a faint sneer. “He says on these hands I must have worn gloves, because there are no fingerprints. On these feet I must have worn bags, because there were no footprints. If I was such a smart criminal, if I would do all those things, why would I go in my own house, and take up half of one board in my attic to use for one piece of this ‘ladder’-something that would always be evidence against me?

“If I wanted to make a ladder, could I not get from around my yard and around my garage all the scrap wood I need? Besides, only about one block from my house is a lumberyard. Listen, I am a carpenter-would I buy wood for five rails only and not know I need wood for six?”

“This wood expert, Koehler,” I said, “claims he tracked the wood the other rails were made of to that neighborhood lumberyard of yours.”

Hauptmann waved a hand gently in the air, as if trying to rub out a stain there. “Koehler himself says he have traced shipments of this lumber to thirty cities. If they sell this wood in Koehler’s neighborhood in Koehler’s town, does that make Koehler the kidnapper?”

“I wonder where he was March first, 1932,” I said. “But you’re right: once the cops get a suspect, the evidence can be made to fit.”

“And if they have evidence that does not fit,” he said, “this evidence, it disappears. When I was arrested, they took among many things, my shoes. What for I at first could not imagine; but then I think: they have a footprint!”

“They do,” I said. “‘Cemetery John’ left one at St. Raymond’s.”

“Then why did they not produce the plaster model that was made?” With bitter sarcasm, he said, “Perhaps they hold this damning evidence back, out of pity for me.”

Reilly should have demanded that plaster cast be produced; but then Reilly should have done a lot of things.

“Did you know they took my fingerprints not once, but again and again? Also the sides of my hands, the hollow parts of the hands. Then at the trial, when my counsel asks about fingerprints, Wilentz says, ‘There are no fingerprints.’”

“There were plenty on the ladder,” I said. “That’s what they were checking against.”

“And found not mine! In the nursery there were no fingerprints at all. Not of the parents, not of the child’s nurse or the other servants. They say I wear gloves. Did the parents, then, when they go to the room to take joy in their child, and all the servants, also wear gloves?”

“It does sound like somebody wiped the room down.” Somebody in the house. Somebody after the fact.

“They found a chisel near the ladder. They compare it to my carpenter’s tools. My tools are a Stanley set; the one they found is a Bucks Brothers chisel. They told the jury, ‘This is Hauptmann’s chisel,’ and the jury believed them.”

“But they didn’t believe your eyewitnesses, did they?”

“My eyewitnesses were good, but then Reilly hired more witnesses, bad witnesses! They were killing me! Crazy people from asylums, people with criminal records…and Wilentz makes of them fools. Because of that, the good people, the witnesses who tell the truth for me, they are not believed. The five people who saw me in New York in the bakery with Annie at the time of the crime, good people, are made out to look like liars. One of these, Manley, an old gentleman, arose from a sickbed and he swore that on the night of March first, 1932, he saw me at nine o’clock in his bakery.”

I snorted a laugh. “Yet old ‘Cataracts’ Hochmuth and that movie cashier and the taxi driver, questionable eyewitnesses at best, were believed.”

“Why, Nate? Why?”

“Well…you mentioned witnesses with criminal records. You do have a criminal record yourself, Dick.”

“Yes, in Germany-after the war. Never in America.” He placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “I come home from the war in rags, sick with hunger. So, too, I find my mother and my brothers and sisters starving. I did steal an overcoat and I stole food. I was just a boy. These things are wrong, yes, but many times by many people were they done in my country after that war. And I have never once injured a human being.”

“You broke and entered through a second-story window, once. And you held up two women wheeling baby carriages-with a gun. Add those two crimes up, and…”

“There were no babies in those carriages! In Germany, at that time, they use those buggies as shopping carts. You know what I stole? Nine bread rolls and some food ration cards. No babies did I frighten.”

“And the second-story job?”

He shrugged. “It was the mayor’s office, as much a prank as a robbery. I stole a silver pocket watch and a few hundred marks. I’m not proud of this-I knew I was doing wrong. I quieted my conscience with, ‘Oh well, others do it, too.’”

Reilly should’ve brought this stuff out at the trial; Wilentz killed Hauptmann with the baby-buggy stickup-which shouldn’t have even been the hell admissible!

“I understand all this, Dick,” I said, “but you have to understand how it worked against you. Just being a German works against you, frankly. And hell-you were a machine gunner in the war-which makes you a killer.”

He sneered a little, and his response was justifiably sarcastic: “Oh-so no American machine gunners were in the war?”

I shook my head. “When the killing’s on your side, it doesn’t count-particularly when you win. And I don’t think your popularity’s been helped by these Nazi bund-type rallies, either, raising money for your defense fund.”

The sarcasm evaporated. “What choice have I? The state confiscated our funds, Annie and me. Are you a Jewish man, Nate?”

“My father was. I’m not very religious.”

“I am.” He smiled nervously. “Religious, I mean. Do you hate me for being German? Do you think I think I am the ‘master race’? Do you think I would hate a Jewish man?”

Wilentz, maybe.

“I’m an American,” I said, “whose forefathers came from Germany. Why should I hate you, or make such assumptions?”

Rather shyly, he touched my shoulder. “Mr. Heller-why weren’t you on the jury?”

“Dick,” I said, “you don’t have to convince me that a lot of the evidence was tampered with or invented. You don’t have to tell me that Hochmuth was blind, or that that movie cashier who said she remembered you was full of shit. I used to be a cop. I know all about that stuff.”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Tell me about Isidor Fisch.” I smiled gently. “Your Jewish friend.”

He laughed soundlessly. “The ‘Fisch story,’ they call it.”

“Everybody did say it smelled.”

“It sounds bad. But it’s true.”

“Tell me. Take your time.”

He drew in a breath, let it out slowly. “I meet Isidor Fisch at Hunter’s Island in Pelham Park. Annie and I and our friends go there many weekends in the winter and summer both. We have enjoyed a wonderful outdoor life there, boating, swimming, fishing…” A small private smile appeared, and a distant look came to his eyes. “…cooking over a fire, playing music and singing…Annie bought me field glasses. I loved to watch the birds.” That brought him back to reality. He got up from the cot and moved quickly to the bars and looked out.

“It’s still caught,” he said, shaking his head. “They give up. Damn. A free thing like that should never be in there.”

“Richard,” I said. “Dick. Tell me about Izzy Fisch.”

He shuffled back over and sat on the cot. He said, “Fisch I meet three, four times at Hunter’s Island. Once he mentions that he is interested in the stock market, like me. But he tells me he is in the fur business, and that there is good money in it. He knows of what he is talking, was a furrier in the old country. I buy some stocks and bonds for him, he bought some furs for me…I start with five hundred dollars I give him to buy furs, and keep reinvesting, until I finally have seven thousand dollars in furs.”

“Where were all these furs being stored?”

“In the fur district in New York, Fisch said, but we never got around to going to where they were in a warehouse. Fisch was sickly, had a bad cough.”

So did Jafsie’s Cemetery John, I recalled.

“One day he said he was going to Germany to visit his parents. He asked me to keep four hundred sealskins at my home, while he was gone. Later on, he asks me when he goes to Germany if he can leave with me some of his belongings, and he brought to my house two satchels, a big one and a small one.”

“What about the money?”

Hauptmann motioned for me to be patient. “The Saturday before Isidor left for Germany, my wife and I give for him a farewell party. He brought along under his arm a cardboard box, wrapped up with string, and asks me to put it in a closet for him and keep it until he comes back. I thought maybe in the box were some things he forgot to put in the satchels, maybe papers and letters. I put the package for him on the upper shelf of the broom closet. It was too high there, for my wife to see, although they try to make her look bad at the trial, because they claim the shelf was low and she cleaned in there and she should see it. But she never did. Anyway. After a while there were rags and things on the shelf, covering up the box, and I forgot all about it. Fisch, he told me he would be back again in two months.”

“But you never heard from him again.”

“Oh, but I did. He wrote me a few times…and then, in March or April, from his brother Pincus I get a letter saying Isidor have died. Pincus asked me, in his letter, as he knew I was a friend of Isidor’s, to look after his brother’s financial business in this country. So I wrote and told Pincus how we stood in the stock and fur business.”

From the expression on Hauptmann’s face, I could tell there had been discrepancies.

“Fisch have told me that he got bank accounts and a safe-deposit box and that he also got ten thousand dollars in some company that bakes pies. Also lots of furs. And that a friend owed him two thousand dollars. But when I start to look around after Isidor have died, I find that the pie company is a fake and that Fisch owes the friend eight hundred dollars, and that another friend he owes four thousand dollars. I could find no furs, except the four hundred skins at my house, which are not worth half what he told me. So I am all mixed up.”

“So you opened up that little box in your closet, and…”

“No! I have forgot all about that box. I go to Fisch’s lawyer, who tells me there is no money, nothing valuable in the safe-deposit box. And I give up.”

“You gave up?”

“Yes. But three or four weeks before I get arrested, it has been raining, like tonight…and the water comes in the broom closet and as I am cleaning it up, I run across the box, soaking wet. When I look, I find it is full of money! Oh ho, I say to myself-this is where Izzy’s money has gone. What he has saved up, he has put in gold certificates. I put the money in a pail, and took it to my garage, where I dried it and hid it like the police found it, except for the few bills I have already spent. I did not put it in the bank, because with gold certificates, I think I should have trouble.”

“You helped yourself, because Izzy was into you for, what? Seven grand?”

He nodded. “Because he owed me money and have tried to cheat me, I see that money and feel it is largely mine.” He shook his head, sighing heavily. “Could I have known that money was Lindbergh baby money? No! The gas station man have testify that I say to him when I gave him that bill, ‘I have a hundred more like that at home.’ Would I say that if I knew that these bills maybe could take my life some day?”

“But you lied to the cops about the money.”

“Because I have gold certificates, and it is illegal! I knew I would get in much trouble if they knew I had so much gold money, and besides, near the money in my garage I have hidden also a pistol which I know I am not supposed to have.”

“Do you think Isidor Fisch was involved in the kidnapping, or anyway, in the extortion?”

He shook his head slowly, hopelessly. “I don’t know, Nate. I wish I did. I know, when I ask around about him, I find he was not the man I thought. He was a crook. Maybe he was trading in what they call ‘hot money.’”

There were footsteps in the corridor.

“Pincus, Izzy’s brother, wrote me to say that shortly before Isidor died, from his bed of death, he called out for me-he seemed to want to say something about me. But he was too weak. He took to his grave that which would be of great help to me now.”

Warden Kimberling’s stocky figure-now in a gray business suit, the black slicker gone-appeared beyond the iron bars. “Mr. Heller, just a few more minutes.”

“Would you mind checking on my secretary, Warden? See how she’s doing?”

He nodded.

As he moved through the door, I saw that whenever that door opened, Hauptmann got a nice clear view of the electric chair, covered in white.

“Six men have walked by me, going to that room, since I come here,” he said with no apparent emotion. “Some of them silent, some of them crying, some even scream.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

The door closed, the warden presumably having a little chat with Evalyn.

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.