Stolen Away

30

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.

“That’s right,” he said, and he extended his hand.

I decked him.

He sat on the kitchen floor, rubbing his jaw, arms and legs pointing every which way, eyes as confused as a drowning kitten’s. “What the hell was that for?”

I leaned over him; both my hands were fists. “That was for faking that fucking phone number. In the closet in the other room?”

His face went slack, his eyes filled with fear and something else. What? Remorse?

“Oh Christ,” he said. “Who are you?”

“The guy who’s going to beat the ever-loving crap out of you, if you don’t ’fess up.”

On his ass, he scuttled back into a corner between kitchen cabinets and stove, like the world’s tallest, skinniest rat. “Listen…I don’t want any trouble…this isn’t gonna pay off for anybody…”

I went over and grabbed him by his raincoat and hauled him off the floor and started slapping him around; his glasses flew off. Evalyn was watching, doing a nervous little jump every time I slapped him. But she liked it.

“Stop!” he said. “Stop!”

I stopped. I was starting to get embarrassed. The guy wasn’t fighting back at all.

“Stop,” he said.

He was crying.

“Jesus,” I said, softly. I let go of him.

He sat on the floor and cried.

“I didn’t hit him that hard,” I said to Evalyn.

She also seemed embarrassed. “I don’t think you did…I think it’s something else.”

I got down on my haunches and said, “You want to talk, Tim?”

Now all three of us were embarrassed.

“Fuck,” he said, wiping tears and snot off his face with big flat hands. Then said to Evalyn, “Excuse the language, ma’am.”

I gave him my handkerchief. He wiped off his face, blew his nose. Awkwardly, he started to hand the hanky back to me.

“It’s yours now,” I said, and helped him to his feet. Evalyn handed him his glasses; they hadn’t broken.

“You…you’re right,” he said, slipping on the specs. “You didn’t hit me that hard. What’s your name, anyway?”

“My name is Heller. I’m a detective from Chicago.”

“What are the Chicago cops doing in this, at this late date?”

“I’m private. Working for Governor Hoffman, and Mrs. McLean, here. You did write Jafsie’s number on the wainscoting, didn’t you?”

He nodded. Sighed heavily. “I got myself a real nice front-page scoop out of it. Got myself a big fat byline. But I never dreamed it would be one of the key goddamn pieces of evidence they used to nail that poor son of a bitch.”

“I never met a reporter with a conscience before.”

“I never knew I had a conscience, till you started slapping me around.”

“So it bothers you.”

“More than I even knew, apparently. I’m sorry. Blubbering like a baby like that…it’s really humiliating…”

“Will you come forward?”

“No,” he said.

“No!” Evalyn said, dumbfounded. The blood, and the sympathy, drained out of her face. She clutched my arm. “Give him the Chicago lie-detector test, Nate!”

“Huh?” O’Neil said. His eyes were large and scared.

“Easy, Evalyn,” I said. “I’m not so young and reckless, anymore.”

Besides, my gun was in my suitcase.

I put a firm hand on O’Neil’s shoulder; he was taller than me, by perhaps three inches, but I outweighed him twenty-five pounds. “You want to run that by me again?”

“I’m not coming forward. I can’t.” He held out his open palms like a beggar. “Precisely ’cause it did get into the trial, as evidence. I might go to jail. I could lose my job. I would be in very deep shit.”

“You are in very deep shit,” I said.

“No,” he said. “You can beat on me…incidentally, I’m prepared to fight you back, now…but it’s not going to change things. You’ll be the one in jail, for assault. And I’d sue Mrs. McLean out of some of that money she obviously has to burn.”

He was right. There really wasn’t much I could do.

“But if you’re investigating Bruno’s case,” he said, “trying to cheat the executioner out of his fun, at the last minute…I can be of help.”

“Oh?”

He nodded vigorously. His face was haggard, dark circles under the eyes. “Check the record. I’ve dug up any number of stories, since the Jafsie phone-number scam, bolstering Hauptmann’s position.”

“You mean you’ve been working to clear him?”

“Not exactly. I’m a reporter, and I do my job…but I’m working that angle, yeah.” He pointed a thumb at his chest. “I’m the guy who tracked down the employment agency records that showed Hauptmann was at work at the Majestic Apartments on March first, 1932, just like he said he was…when the cops conveniently lost the time sheets for that week.”

“You are trying to balance the books, aren’t you, Tim? What can you give me?”

“How about the real lowdown on Izzy Fisch?” he asked, with a wicked little smile, like a jeweler about to show Evalyn a really big rock.

She and I exchanged significant glances.

“What have you got, Tim?” I asked.

“Plenty. See, I’ve got a big story on Fisch in the works. Real in-depth. But none of what I’ve got is public knowledge yet-for example, I know that the cops have ledger books and letters they confiscated from this apartment, that tend to back up the so-called Fisch story-none of which was used at the trial. I know lab tests back up Hauptmann’s claim that the money he had was water-soaked. And I know that Fisch was a confidence man who borrowed money from friends to invest in nonexistent businesses. I can tell you, based upon dozens of instances I’ve tracked, that Isidor Fisch never once repaid a loan.”

“So he was a small-time con artist. But was he a large-scale crook?”

O’Neil shook his head, made a clicking sound in his cheek. “That I don’t know. Could he have been in on the kidnapping? Sure. Masterminded it? I dunno. I know this: the rooming house he lived in was right smack in the middle of the Italian mob’s stomping grounds.”

“Luciano territory?”

“And how.” He seemed amused as he asked: “Does a Chicago boy like you know what Luciano’s best-paying racket is, since Repeal?”

I nodded. “Dope.”

“Give the man a cigar. And here Izzy Fisch is, importing furs and making trips to Europe. Think he might have been importing more than just sealskins? And I was able to connect Fisch to at least one Luciano hoodlum, a guy named Charley DeGrasie, who’s dead now, unfortunately. That was when the story started getting a little warm, and I backed off.”

I was taking notes, by this time. “Is that all you have on Fisch, then?”

“Not hardly. I talked to a guy named Arthur Trost. He’s a paint contractor. He said he knew Fisch since the summer of ’31, that he used to run into Fisch at a billiard parlor in Yorkville-German section of Manhattan. Around the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Fisch stopped frequenting the place.”

“So?”

“So in the summer of ’32, a painter pal of Trost’s asks him if he wanted to buy some hot money for fifty cents on the dollar from a friend of his. Trost told the guy he’d have to meet the person doing the selling, and got escorted to that very same billiard parlor, where who should be waiting but Isidor Fisch. Trost told his pal that he already knew Fisch and that Fisch already owed him money and that he wouldn’t believe Fisch if he was calling for help from the window of a burning building.”

“So Trost never actually saw this ‘hot money.’”

“No. But it connects Fisch to dealing in hot cash, doesn’t it? Considering the timing, very likely Lindbergh cash. I also talked to a guy named Gustave Mancke, who runs an ice-cream parlor in New Rochelle. He and his wife Sophie swear that for an eight-week period in January and February of ’32, right up to the Sunday before the kidnapping, Izzy Fisch ate in their shop every Sunday evening.”

“That doesn’t sound like much of a revelation.”

“It does when you consider Mancke claims Fisch would always meet with the same two people.”

“Oh? And who did he meet with?”

“Violet Sharpe,” he said, “and Ollie Whately.”