Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  I merely nodded.

  He smiled, embarrassed, suddenly. “I guess I’m too much of a politician to resist climbing up on a soapbox—even when I’m sitting down. Let me fill you in on these ‘witnesses.’…”

  Turning to his folders and documents and some notes, Hoffman went down the motley group one by one.

  “Let’s start with the remarkable Mr. Amandus Hochmuth,” Hoffman said, and I of course recognized that as the name of the Sourlands geezer who claimed Hauptmann had “glared” at him from a car the day of the kidnapping. “First of all, Hochmuth waited until two months after Hauptmann’s arrest to come forward. Second of all, a friendly state trooper sent me a report of an interview conducted with Hochmuth shortly after the kidnapping, when Hochmuth said he’d seen nobody suspicious in the vicinity. Here….”

  “What’s this?” I asked, as the governor handed across a document.

  “A photostat of Hochmuth’s 1932 welfare report,” Hoffman said. “Look at the line on ‘health status.’”

  “Tartly blind,’” I read. “‘Failing eyesight due to cataracts.’ He puts the eye in eyewitness, all right.” The photostat revealed him also to be Client #14106 in the Division of Old Age Security, Department of Welfare, New York City. “This thing gives his address as the Bronx!”

  “A false address,” Hoffman said matter-of-factly, “so he could collect public funds from New York, while living in New Jersey.”

  “Well, times are hard.”

  “I invited Mr. Hochmuth up to my office, not long ago and, because it was at my expense I’m sure, he accommodated me. He sat where you’re sitting, Mr. Heller.” Hoffman pointed to the filing cabinet with the silver cup brimming with flowers. “I asked him to identify that.”

  “Did he?”

  “Certainly. He identified it as a picture—a picture of a woman.”

  I laughed.

  “Because of reactions similar to yours, from myself, an aide and a criminologist present,” Hoffman said, “Mr. Hochmuth realized he’d guessed wrong. So he tried again—and identified that eighteen-inch-tall silver cup, filled with flowers, as a woman’s hat.”

  “He never did get it right?”

  “His third try was closest: a bowl of fruit.”

  “Well, law of averages. At least it didn’t glare at him.”

  He sorted some more. “And now we come to Millard Whited, a Sourlands hillbilly who claimed he saw Hauptmann prowling near the Lindbergh estate. Mr. Whited, it seems, is on the one hand impoverished, and on the other, a liar; so say his neighbors, at any rate.”

  “Wasn’t it Whited’s testimony that got Hauptmann extradited from New York to here?”

  Hoffman nodded. “Whited was brought to the Bronx courthouse to make an eyewitness identification, which he did. But I have in my possession…” He patted the stack of documents before him. “…statements Whited gave the State Police within two months of the crime that he hadn’t seen any suspicious persons in the vicinity of the Lindbergh estate. So I invited Mr. Whited—at my expense—for a visit.”

  “Did he think your loving cup was a hat?”

  “No. But he did admit he’d received a one-hundred-fifty-dollar fee, thirty-five dollars’ expenses per diem and a promise of a share of the reward money. Particularly interesting, considering on the witness stand at Flemington, he denied receiving anything but dinner money.”

  “That thirty-five bucks per diem jibes with what I got paid for coming out.” Apparently I wasn’t important enough to get a fee, though.

  “The other eyewitnesses are similarly suspect. The cab driver, Perrone, it turns out positively identified several other suspects as ‘John,’ before Hauptmann’s arrest. The traveling salesman, Rossiter, who claimed he saw Hauptmann changing a tire near Princeton, three days before the kidnapping, is a known embezzler and thief. The movie-theater cashier, Mrs. Barr, sold tickets to over fifteen hundred people on the night of November twenty-sixth, 1933, but could pick Hauptmann out, a year later, as a man who gave her a folded five-dollar bill that turned out to be one of the ransom bills. Never mind that November twenty-sixth is Hauptmann’s birthday, and that on that night he and his wife and friends were at home celebrating.”

  “Quite an array, these witnesses.”

  “Yes, but we mustn’t forget the celebrity. The man who made a positive eyewitness identification of Hauptmann based upon two words he heard spoken a block away—four years before.”

  Charles A. Lindbergh.

  “And then of course,” he continued, flicking cigar ash into a silver ashtray, “there’s Jafsie. That wonderful American—who when I reopened this investigation, and announced that I wanted to question him, promptly left on an extended vacation to Panama.”

  I had to laugh. “Is he still gone?”

  “Actually, he’s supposed to have returned today. And he is one of the people I want you to go around and question.”

  “All right, but only because you’re paying me. Last I heard, old Jafsie was hitting the vaudeville circuit, with a Lindbergh lecture.”

  “Well,” Hoffman said, “I can tell you one thing he didn’t lecture about: the period when he was the chief suspect in the case. I have an affidavit declaring that after Condon initially failed to identify Hauptmann as John at the Greenwich Street Police Station in the Bronx…and he was adamant about not identifying Hauptmann, there…Jafsie was intimidated and threatened by the police.”

  “I’d be surprised if he wasn’t.”

  “That was New York. Two Jersey state troopers have indicated to me that Condon was threatened by Schwarzkopf and his bullyboy Welch with an indictment for obstructing justice…which is what they got Commodore Curtis on, you may recall…if the old boy didn’t recant and identify Hauptmann as ‘Cemetery John.’”

  “No wonder Jafsie changed his tune.”

  “He was quoted by a trooper as saying, ‘I would not like to be indicted in New Jersey, for they would choke you for a cherry in New Jersey.’”

  I laughed at that. “One of Jafsie’s few intentionally humorous remarks,” I said. “Sure, I’ll talk to him. Who else do you want me to see?”

  “Well, among others, check in with Gaston Means.”

  “Means! Isn’t he in Leavenworth?”

  “That’s his official federal residence. Right now he’s under observation at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. For what he himself refers to as ‘high brain blood pressure.’ At the same time, he’s been bombarding my office with confessions; claims he’s the one who engineered the kidnapping.”

  I sighed. “It’s a waste of time, but I’ll talk to him.”

  “I know. But these hoaxers all seem to have some element of truth, or near-truth, in their stories.”

  “That’s how a good con is mounted, Governor. So let me guess the next name on your list: Commodore John Hughes Curtis.”

  “Not necessarily next, but yes, do check in with him. You do realize, Mr. Heller, that the State of New Jersey convicted Curtis on an obstructing-justice charge, on the assumption he’d had contact with the actual kidnap gang?”

  “He got off with a fine and a suspended sentence, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but my point is, in the same courtroom as the Hauptmann trial, one of the same prosecutors, and the same judge, convicted Curtis—why? Because, they said, he’d dealt with six persons who had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby; that by not letting the state troopers in on his actions, Curtis had prevented the apprehension of the kidnappers.”

  “So the Garden State is having it both ways: a kidnap gang, to convict Curtis; a lone-wolf kidnapper, to convict Hauptmann.”

  “Exactly. And it doesn’t wash with me. There’s more, there’s so much more….” He went riffling through the papers: he began rattling off the injustices.

  A copy of a physical examination by Dr. Thurston H. Dexter on September 25, 1934, a few days after Hauptmann’s arrest, showed that the prisoner had been “subjected recently to a severe beating, all or mostly with blunt inst
ruments.”

  Work records at the Majestic Apartments, where Hauptmann claimed he was working during the period of the kidnapping, had been tampered with and in some cases stolen or suppressed.

  A statement from fingerprint expert Erasmus Hudson, who found five-hundred-some prints on the kidnap ladder, none of them Hauptmann’s, and said that Inspector Welch had asked him if it were possible to fake a fingerprint. (Hudson had said no, much to Welch’s obvious disappointment.)

  Judge Trenchard denying Hauptmann’s request for a lie-detector test.

  And there was new evidence, too: handwriting expert Samuel Small demonstrated that Hauptmann wrote in the Palmer-Zaner system and not the vertical roundhand system of the ransom notes. In his affidavit, Small wrote: “It isn’t a question of if Hauptmarm wrote those letters. It is a question whether he could have written them. I tell you that if you went to the prison and said to Hauptmann, ‘I will let you free if you can write a single sentence the way it is written in the ransom letters,’ Hauptmann would have to stay in prison the rest of his life.”

  Of course, I knew—like just about any cop who’d been in and around the court system in major criminal cases—that handwriting experts, like alienists, were typical, “expert” testimony. Both sides had theirs. Bought and paid.

  “You realize, don’t you,” Hoffman said, “that the state spent more money on its handwriting experts alone than was spent on the entire Hauptmann defense.”

  “Even with Hearst footing part of the bill?”

  “Even then. It cost over a million dollars to put Hauptmann on death row…but right now I don’t have a single dollar of state funds available to try to get him off death row.”

  “Excuse me?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “Mr. Heller, I staked the investigators I mentioned on my own—on small sums that barely covered their expenses, out of my own meager resources.”

  “Governor, no offense—but the terms we discussed on the phone, those aren’t negotiable.”

  “I’m not the one paying your fee, Mr. Heller.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. I mentioned an old friend of yours…just a moment.” The intercom on his desk was buzzing. A garbled voice spoke to the governor, and he said, “Fine. Send her in.” He looked up at me with his ready smile; he put out his cigar. “The party who recommended you is paying for your services.”

  The door opened behind me and a small handsome woman in a black dress and a black fur and a black hat with a black veil entered; jewelry glittered amidst the somber apparel. Perpetually in mourning for who knows what, Evalyn Walsh McLean entered the room, and reentered my life.

  “Governor,” she said, smiling sadly, extending him her black-gloved hand; he rose behind the desk and took it, briefly. She turned to me. Behind the veil her eyes seemed tragic and delighted. “Nathan. It’s wonderful to see you.”

  “Likewise, Mrs. McLean,” I said, taking her hand briefly. I gave her my chair and got myself a new one. I was suddenly nervous.

  “Mrs. McLean has never lost her interest in the Lindbergh case,” the governor said.

  “The official solution of this case,” she said, regally, “is not satisfactory. There are loose ends to be gathered up. And I felt Nathan Heller was just the man to do the gathering.”

  She looked older, of course, but fine; her figure remained slender, busty, her face gaining character with the years without losing beauty.

  “Mrs. McLean has rented the Hauptmann apartment,” Hoffman said. “So you can have a look around there. We’ve already had a criminologist in, and a wood expert, to have a look in the attic.”

  The prosecution’s star witness was a wood expert named Koehler—who’d been about to testify the day I was at the trial, but got stalled by the defense.

  “It struck me as ridiculous,” Evalyn said, “that a man who supposedly was so brilliant, so clever a master criminal that he could engineer the kidnapping of the century all alone, would also be so stupid as to fashion a single rail of the kidnap ladder from a floorboard in his own attic.”

  “Actually,” I said, “what’s really ridiculous is the notion he’d need the lumber. Hauptmann was a carpenter. He had something of a workshop in his garage, didn’t he? There must’ve been scrap lumber all over hell.”

  “And a lumberyard nearby,” Hoffman added, nodding.

  “In any event, he wouldn’t have left the ladder behind,” I said. “Not a carpenter who fashioned it himself—particularly if one rail were a board from his own house. That evidence was as planted as the tree it came from.”

  “So said our criminologist and a wood technician from the WPA,” Hoffman said, rather proudly. “The ladder rail was a sixteenth of an inch thicker than the attic boards. Also, the nail holes weren’t deep enough to accommodate eightpenny nails that came from the attic floor.”

  “That ladder,” Evalyn said bitterly, “was what Prosecutor Wilentz pledged to ‘hang around Hauptmann’s neck.’”

  “And he did,” Hoffman said. “The question is, Mr. Heller, can you give us something as major as that ladder—only favorable, and not fabricated? Something that no one, no matter how biased, could deny?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have very long, do I?”

  “The end of the month.” He shrugged. “Fourteen days.”

  “Hell,” I said, with blatantly phony optimism, “maybe Ellis Parker is right, and the kid’s still alive. Maybe I can track the boy down and sit him right there on your desk, and he can have an ice-cream cone while you phone his folks.”

  Hoffman smiled at that, but sadly.

  “We’ve tried everything,” Evalyn said, shaking her head, sighing. “I even hired the top defense attorney in the country, but it didn’t work out.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Why, Sam Leibowitz, of course,” she said. “But the approach Sam took was disastrous.”

  Sam Leibowitz!

  “How so?” I asked.

  Hoffman sighed. “He was convinced Hauptmann was guilty. The few times he visited Hauptmann, he tried to badger a confession out of him. Felt if he could convince Hauptmann to name his accomplices, then Hauptmann’s life would be spared.”

  “And how did Hauptmann react?”

  “With his usual quiet indignation,” Hoffman said. “He did not crack—and Leibowitz was off the case as quickly as he came on.”

  “Don’t you know,” I asked Evalyn, “who Leibowitz is?”

  “Certainly,” she said stiffly, defensively. “He’s the best damn trial attorney in the country.” Then studying me, she melted and said, “Why, Nathan? What do you mean?”

  I looked at Hoffman. “You told me about Reilly. Now I’ll tell you about Leibowitz: he’s a mob attorney, too. Anyway, he made his mark defending guys like ‘Mad Dog’ Coll and a certain well-known Chicago figure with a scarred face.”

  “He defended Al Capone?” Evalyn asked breathlessly.

  “Yes. On a triple murder charge. And got him off.”

  “I’m sure Sam Leibowitz…” Hoffman began.

  But I said: “I’ll tell you one thing about this case, which I learned many years ago—you can’t be sure about anything. Now. Where do I start?”

  The governor shrugged. “Where I did, I guess. With Hauptmann. See for yourself. Talk to Hauptmann.”

  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 co
nvertible, 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.