by Ed Ifkovic
Chapter Ten
A freezing morning, six a.m., unable to sleep, I bundled up but faced wind squalls, ice pellets, abandoning my walk within minutes. A blizzard had covered the town during the night. I watched horse-drawn sleighs hauling milk to the Union Hotel. When I walked into the hotel through the back entrance, I spotted Peggy Crispen standing in the hallway, dressed in her waitress uniform, her winter coat draped over her arm. She was trembling.
“Peggy.” I approached her, alarmed.
She shook her head. “No. Leave me alone.”
“What? What happened?”
She was disoriented, swaying back and forth, moving her head wildly, searching the empty hallway.
“I don’t know what to do.”
I grasped her elbow. “Tell me what happened.”
Her eyes were glassy, faraway. Focusing, she offered me a thin smile. “Last night when I returned to my room, the door was cracked open. I know I latched it when I left. I always do. But it was open.”
“Someone broke in?”
She nodded furiously. “Yes.”
“What did they take?”
Silence, trembling lips, then a slight gasp. “Nothing.” She closed her eyes. “I think—nothing.”
“Then what?”
“They pulled open drawers, overturned furniture, ripped the seams of my clothes, dumped my makeup on the floor, smashed dishes on the shelf.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Well, I started screaming, a neighbor came rushing in, called the owner from downstairs. He called the police.”
“And?”
“They asked me what was taken. When I told them nothing, they backed off. The cop did, I mean. He smirked at me. The landlord was there and they talked about how it was where Annabel was strangled.” She looked into my eyes, terrified. “Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘You gotta be careful.’ That’s what he said. Like it was nothing. Then he said, ‘Maybe someone read about the murder and thought the place was empty and could find something to pawn.’”
“That’s feeble,” I told her. “And unacceptable.”
She bit her lip. “Then they all went away, and I was left to pick up the pieces.”
“What do you think, Peggy? Who?”
She spun around, as though fearful someone lurked in the shadows, stalking her. So quick her movement that I also jumped, swung around. Nothing: no one: silence. But a chill ran up my spine.
Slowly, her words a low hiss, she squeaked out, “It was the letter.”
“The letter,” I echoed. “Did they find it?”
She didn’t answer. Thrusting out her arm, she pushed against me, hurried down the hallway, dragging her coat along the floor. I called after her, but she never looked back.
I debated knocking on Aleck’s door, but changed my mind. Instead, I went into my room, showered, dressed for breakfast, and checked my notes. I needed to be in the courtroom that morning because the Times expected a column from me. I needed to record what I saw. “The human interest angle,” my editor had stressed over and over. “We’ll handle the legal stuff, reprint the daily transcript, but you and Aleck will provide the local color.”
Aleck had whispered to me after we left that luncheon in Times Square, “We’ve been hired as scribbling gladiators in a Jersey Circus Maximus.”
“Yes,” I’d answered, “let the blood-letting begin.”
But what intrigued me now was not so much the dynamics of the courtroom—the bluster and swell of young Attorney General David Wilentz for the prosecution and the old-style fire-and-brimstone of the defense attorney Edward Reilly. No, what fascinated were the sudden bits and pieces of Annabel’s ill-fated move to Flemington and her connection with the Morrow and Lindbergh households. Idly reviewing my notes, I scanned the press articles I’d been given in a folder, all dating back to the night of the kidnapping. In particular I read that Violet Sharp had left the Morrow mansion at eight that night, going with an “Ernie”—no last name—and two of his friends to the Peanut Grill roadhouse, returning at eleven, her return witnessed by old Mrs. Morrow herself. Though Violet stumbled on delivering the truth—movies, not roadhouse—she later changed her story.
Ernie, I thought. And the Peanut Grill roadhouse in Orangeburg. Montclair Manor, the den of madness somewhere in New Jersey. The Morrow siblings. Anne, beloved wife of the hero. Dwight, disaffected only son, in and out of mental hospitals. And this…this mysterious Blake Somerville whom Violet adored, the rich young man who routinely seduced and manipulated and cajoled—and somehow was at the heart of all of this.
Yes, Aleck pooh-poohed it all as a vain girl’s folly, but not so fast. That was the story I wanted to explore.
Aleck, though he might balk, would have to be Sancho Panza as I tilted at windmills.
And now the moment with Peggy Crispen in the hallway.
Cody Lee Thomas sat in a jail cell, probably in shouting distance of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, both men accused of murder.
Someone did not want the truth to come out, and I didn’t believe it had anything to do with Cody Lee. Someone had strangled Annabel Biggs to cover up another crime. Perhaps someone had stolen the incendiary letters, if—the awful if here—they’d actually been stolen. Perhaps that burglar now realized that there was another letter that would implicate—might turn the law’s pinpoint focus away from the hapless Bruno. Or somehow not only him but others as well. The gang of kidnappers that Colonel Schwarzkopf often talked of. Used to talk of—because these days his press statements focused only on Bruno, the lone wolf. The arrest of Cody Lee Thomas was happenstance, perhaps fortuitous—but it didn’t end the story. The existence of the letters—and the suicide of Violet Sharp—told me that.
Aleck wasn’t at breakfast, though everyone else in the world was: Adela Rogers St. John was pontificating about how her father, the storied jurist Earl Rogers, would have dealt with the trial. She’d made clear her allegiance to Hearst with her condemnation of Bruno Hauptmann. A fashion plate, each day of the trial she’d appeared in a different Hattie Carnegie outfit, designed especially for her. She looked good in the rotogravure. Now, sharing coffee with Walter Winchell, she nodded as he snarkily announced that Judge Trenchard, the seasoned jurist who presided, was a personal friend and “an American, to boot.” He added, “That says it all.”
Well, of course, it said nothing at all, as I glared at him, pulled in my disapproving cheeks. Unfortunately, he caught my look. He actually grimaced, the look of a menaced dog ready to bite.
I looked for Peggy Crispen, but she was not in the café. A band of waiters and Martha Tripp moved among the diners, though Martha looked distracted, her face flushed, slopping a glass of orange juice onto the floor, ignoring it, and then ignoring a customer’s call for more coffee. She kept glancing toward the kitchen door, her countenance icy. Finally, his face as stern and flushed as his wife’s, Horace Tripp followed a waiter out of the kitchen, his hands holding a tray of cereal bowls. He mumbled some words into the neck of the young waiter, who turned, stumbled, then apologized for something he had done. His garbled, loud “Not my fault” sailed over the room, and Horace’s frown deepened.
I called him to my table. “Mr. Tripp.” I waited as his eyes scanned the room.
He approached me. “Miss Ferber?”
“An hour ago I bumped into Peggy Crispen in the hallway, distraught. She mentioned a burglary in her room. She was frightened and…”
He interrupted me. “Peggy has been canned.”
“Fired?”
Sarcasm in his voice. “Another way of putting it, I’m afraid.”
“You let her go?”
His eye got wide. “Me? Of course not. We’re short-handed as it is. Lord, with the loss of Annabel Biggs, we had to scramble.” He stopped, unsure of his indiscretion. “I’m sorry. I’d don’t mean to talk of this.”
He surveyed the large room again, but lowered his voice. “The management found fault with her. I gather she was weeping in the lobby, distressed, became agitated, her face splotchy with…with that makeup she wears, and when she ran into the kitchen”—he pointed behind him—“she had a loud argument with Martha.”
“About what?”
Walter Winchell looked up from his table and eyed me suspiciously. Adela Rogers St. Johns was polishing a rhinestone brooch on her lapel.
“I was doing something else. Martha called attention to Peggy’s disheveled look, her weepy face, and Peggy babbled about a robbery, which alarmed us, of course. I rushed over, but Martha lost her temper and accused Peggy of”—again the furtive glance around the room during which he caught Winchell’s censorious eye—“questionable behavior. Peggy snapped, actually slapped my wife. Slapped her. All this, of course, in the kitchen, thank God, but loud enough to entertain the early-bird reporters who jumped up. Mr. Lawrence, the head boss, who’d followed the noise, dismissed her at once.”
“Where is she?”
“I assume she’s home. If only she wasn’t so…hysterical.”
“Back to her room?”
Again the sarcasm. “Where else?”
His tone annoyed me. “Perhaps she could catch her breath in your own rooms, sir.” An unforgiveable remark, perhaps, but joyous for me to deliver.
His face blanched, his jaw dropped with the suddenness of a cartoon character, a clattering of teeth, and he half-bowed and darted away.
From behind me a voice roared, “Good work, darling Ferb. You do know how to eviscerate a man.” Aleck slid into a chair opposite me.
“I have lots of practice with you.”
“Ah, a glib breakfast rejoinder that goes for the jugular.”
“That wasn’t the part of your body I was referring to.”
“Brava, Ferb. Much better. You must have laced your coffee with a squirt of bathtub gin you salvaged from a hip flask during your flapper days.”
Enough of this. “Aleck, Peggy has been fired. Someone broke into her rooms and ransacked them.”
His eyes widened. “Oh, my God. The letter?”
“I never got an answer from her.”
“The poor dear. Well, I must…”
A chair slid across the tiled floor from another table, tucked itself between us, and Joshua Flagg looked from me to Aleck. An odd smirk covered his features, his face clownish. He was a dangerous chameleon, I realized—last time I thought him peculiar-looking, a face off-kilter, a crooked jawline and a pointed nose. Today, fresh scrubbed, his hair trimmed and his moustache shellacked, he was caddishly handsome. He would be the young man you nostalgically remembered when you were safely married and away from him.
“Ah, the intrepid reporter for Hearst.”
He shook his head. “No, not a reporter. I told you. An aide.”
“A spy who tells everyone his business,” Aleck offered.
A twinkle in Joshua’s eye. “Words, words, words.”
“That’s all we have,” I noted.
“I doubt that,” he said to me. “You have a curiosity.”
“And evidence for that is?”
He sat back, rolled his tongue over his upper lip. “Observation. The trained eye of a world observer, a bright fellow as myself.”
“Like our visit to Annabel’s room—and Peggy’s?” I forced him to look into my face. “By ‘our’ I include you, sir, rapping on the door and then running down the stairwell like a spooked kitten.”
He chortled but there was nothing funny in his laugh. “A mistake on my part.”
“Mr. Flagg,” I began, “I don’t seem to recall inviting you to our breakfast table, and yet here you sit, tucked in between us like an orphan begging for a spot at the dinner table.”
“I never beg.”
“You are now, sir.”
“I guess I am.”
“So what does Hearst’s peripatetic reporter want from us?”
He waved his hand in the air. “I’m not a reporter. I’m an aide…an assistant.”
“So what do you need assistance with?”
He faltered, his neck getting crimson, a bead of sweat on his brow. “Just that…”
Aleck was impatient. “Speak up, fool, for God’s sake.”
He rushed his words. “I was wondering what you two are on the trail of?”
“Meaning?”
“Miss Ferber, you were spotted visiting Cody Lee Thomas in jail. A common murderer, below contempt. Rumor has it you even stared down Bruno Richard Hauptmann.” I started to say something but he held up a hand. “I mean, you were allowed to see him close up. No one else can.”
Aleck was making a clicking sound. “Edna, what? You did what? You visited the jail? And didn’t tell me?”
“A memory lapse, Aleck.”
“What are you up to, dear?”
“Nothing, Aleck. A chance meeting—with Hauptmann.”
“Chance?”
“It was an act of amusement by the deputy, sir, someone having fun with me. I was supposed to quake and shiver. I suspect Hovey Low believes women are cowering simpletons. He didn’t know that I interviewed craven murderers in old-time Milwaukee when I was barely in my twenties.”
“Nelly Bly with a beer stein,” Aleck sneered, still annoyed.
Joshua ignored Aleck. “Then you two were cozy in Annabel Biggs’ room right after she was murdered. Talking to Peggy, the waitress, the chubby girl who keeps telling me to get lost.”
“What do you want from her? And, I repeat, from us?”
He breathed in and whispered, “There’s another story going on here. Annabel and this dead Violet Sharp were related.”
I stiffened. “How do you know that, sir?”
“Annabel got a little tipsy in a roadhouse one night, and the gal liked to rattle on and on about a pot of gold just out of reach. She said too much—hinted that Violet Sharp—that suicide on the floor of the Morrow mansion that everyone still wonders about, especially the defense team for Bruno—told her something.”
“Well, the secret obviously died with her. With Annabel, I mean.”
“Did it?” A sharp, penetrating gaze, his dark gray eyes shiny.
“I had one brief conversation with the girl, Mr. Flagg. She served me coffee.”
“And yet you visit her murderer and then her roommate.”
“I’m a reporter. I follow leads.”
Aleck harrumphed. “Where is this going?” He pouted. “Why have I been kept in…darkness?”
Joshua sat back, stretched out his legs. “I’m trying to find out what you know, lady. Annabel and Violet and…and even Violet’s sister Emily. The three Fates, as it were. Somehow they got mixed into this cauldron of kidnapping and ransom money and death and German illegal aliens to our shores.”
“Well, I don’t understand it either,” I concluded.
“Are you sure?”
I sat up straight. “I’m not in the habit of lying, young man. That’s the truth.”
His eyes swept the room. He nodded in the direction of Walter Winchell. “Pompous little ass, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well,” I smiled, “we agree on something.” A heartbeat. “But that’s not why you’re sitting with us—to malign a prominent radio personality and hack writer for the Mirror.”
He grinned. “I don’t miss an opportunity to mock my superiors.”
“That must require an enormous amount of your free time.”
He laughed out loud.
I understood now why he was sitting at our table. He feared we’d stumbled on a piece of a puzzle that was his concern. Or he didn’t want us to fit the pieces together. He wanted to know w
hat we knew. Either he harbored some horrible secret and was afraid we’d also caught on, or he lacked some details and hoped we’d supply the missing information. A scurrilous young man, a shiftless sort. He was smiling at me now, attempting to woo me. I stared into his face. “I think it’s time you left us alone. My coffee is cold.”
When he started to say something, I turned aside. Finally, he walked away.
Chapter Eleven
Aleck and I crossed the street toward the courthouse and showed our passes at the entrance—red for journalists, white for officials, yellow for telegraphers. We were shown to our seats in the packed, hot room. The narrow winding stairs led up to a gallery where spectators and reporters gaped, admitted first come, first served. A high-ceilinged room with yellow walls, large windows on either side and behind the judge’s dais. Old church-pew benches lined the walls, folding chairs appropriated from the Flemington Fairgrounds. Reporters scribbled on pine boards—no typewriters allowed. Five hundred folks were jam-packed in the room, and I noticed one man, his overcoat bulky and pitched to his side, concealed the lens of a forbidden camera. The judge had ordered no cameras, no newsreels, but the click and blip of mechanical noises surfaced as we waited.
Attorney General David Wilentz was trying his first criminal case. A young man, probably in his thirties, a rail-thin handsome man with a slender dark face, shiny black hair, he’d stepped into the Union Hotel lounge the day before dressed in a snazzy suit, a pearl-gray felt fedora with the brim snapped down in front and to one side, a velvet-collared Chesterfield overcoat, a white silk scarf encircling his neck. But now standing before the judge, he wore a simple blue suit, a stiff, high-collared white shirt, and an understated striped tie and handkerchief—the country lawyer gone to court.
He spent the morning thundering about the quality of lumber, his witness a “wood expert,” a scholar who had a lot to say about the various types of wood that compose the kidnapping ladder—and one piece in particular that Wilentz insisted—he hammered home the idea, his facile voice rising as he faced the jury—came from Bruno Hauptmann’s own attic.
“Impressive young man,” I whispered to Aleck.