by Ed Ifkovic
Aleck ran his tongue into his cheek. “I’m surprised you haven’t already. A mash note scented with your cloying gardenia perfume.”
I turned my back on him.
Judge Trenchard called it a day.
***
Back in my room, resting on the bed, I skimmed through a folder of articles supplied by the editor at the Times. Yes, all the minutia of the daily trial fascinated me, especially watching the celebrated Lindbergh, arguably the most famous and popular man in America—in the world?—slowly and methodically recount the unimaginable horrors of the past few years. But what had come to fascinate me was the chronicle of Annabel Biggs and her cousin Violet Sharp. That dynamic. That puzzle. I reread articles from the immediate days of the kidnapping, the iterated questioning of the skittish and volatile Violet Sharp, the frightened young British girl who crumbled before the authorities.
Something had happened in the Morrow household. But what? A prank, planned, according to Peggy. A prank that involved Dwight Morrow, Jr.’s involvement with Blake Somerville—and Violet Sharp, who obviously had a fascination with the mysterious man. But what? A prank to kidnap the baby—make-believe? Make the child disappear from home? Ransom money handed over? But was it just a foolish barroom game they played—and Violet believed it? Or had they really done it? A fake kidnapping of Little Lindy that went awry? Impossible. Dwight and Blake at Amherst College. Then meeting again at an insane asylum in Montclair? Impossible. Violet’s confession to her cousin in a series of letters, and the last one the most explosive—a letter missing now or destroyed. Letters that brought Annabel Biggs to Flemington to extort cash from Lindbergh. Blackmail. The sacrosanct Morrow family—Dwight, the shunned son. That seemed farfetched, but…Annabel now murdered, and not by Cody Lee Thomas. That much I knew. And her room violated again. Those letters possibly taken. Hard to know. A letter searched for and found by Peggy Crispen, an innocent victim of the drama, now scared out of her wits.
Violet Sharp. A suicide.
But did she still hold the answer?
How did Bruno Richard Hauptmann figure in all of this?
I reread an article that talked of Violet’s activities the night of March 1, 1932, her visit to a roadhouse with Ernie Miller and another couple. They drank illegal beer. She drank coffee. Only coffee. Why? Ernie was asked. He didn’t know. In fact, he didn’t know anything about her. He’d been driving on Lydecker Street in Englewood and spotted Violet and her sister, Emily, walking. Thinking he knew them, he stopped, and, flirting, invited Violet to go out. No, no, she said, but gave him her number. One time—the night of the kidnapping.
Ernie Miller. He might have the answer.
I was late meeting Aleck at the Puritan Restaurant down the street. He was seated at a table by the window and had already eaten. Peeved, he pointed to the remains of a chocolate cake. A smear of chocolate rested ingloriously on a plump cheek.
“Saving that for later?” I asked him.
“Edna, Edna, the problem with our conversations is that I find myself waking up in the middle of them.”
“Ernie Miller.” I stared into his face.
“Now you’re speaking in tongue.” A pause. “Singular.”
“He’s the one who took Violet Sharp to that speakeasy the night of the kidnapping.”
“We all know that, Edna.” He signaled to the waiter for another piece of cake. I ordered baked chicken, though I wasn’t hungry. “And he’s scheduled to testify for the prosecution in an upcoming session.”
“But he may have information on this…this cockamamie tale that Annabel spun—the rich boy’s prank, although I hardly think ‘prank’ is the proper word here.”
“If prank it were, Ferb. To my thinking, Annabel and Violet exchanged giddy schoolgirl letters, imagined romances and imagined wealth and outright nonsense. Nothing of that happened.”
I broke in. “You don’t believe that, Aleck. Annabel was murdered.”
His mouth was stuffed with cake. “Yes, by the country hick named Cody Lee Thomas, dirt under his nails and hayseed in his buck teeth.”
“No, he didn’t do it.”
Aleck waited a long time. “Edna dear, you’re like a vaudeville skit in which one end of the horse rides west, the other east.”
“I need to meet with Ernie Miller.”
Aleck choked as he sipped coffee. “Impossible.”
“You have more power at the Times—on Broadway—than I do. Find me an address. Set up a meeting.”
He banged a fist on the table. “I will not be a part of this.”
“Frankly, I don’t want you there. You scare children.”
“Obviously not enough.” He winked at me.
“They told me to follow up human interest leads, the Times did. This is one.”
Aleck got serious, his fingers gripping a cigarette and slipping it into his ivory holder. “Leave this alone, Ferb.”
“No, I won’t.”
“I will not speak at your funeral.”
“And why not?”
“A waste of my words. There will be no one there to hear my eloquent lies.”
“An empty room has never stopped you before.”
He sighed. “I’ll see what I can do. But no good will come of this.”
“I don’t suppose it will. Nothing about our sojourn in Flemington can possibly have a happy ending.”
He nodded to the entrance. “Look what the cat allowed in.”
Joshua Flagg had walked in, but he dragged a foot. A white bandage covered one eyebrow. There was a bright purple welt under a swollen eye.
“I know Hearst employees bring out the worst in folks but this?”
Aleck snickered. “It’s a delightful story. Edna, you obviously missed it.”
“Tell me.”
We watched Joshua Flagg spot us, deliberate approaching, then deciding to slink out the door, so hasty a move he careened into a customer, who cursed him. Aleck relished gossip, so he cleared his throat, glanced around him, and spoke loudly. “I heard it from one of our drivers, you know, Marcus, the good-looking one you can’t seem to take your eyes off.”
I cut in. “For God’s sake, Aleck.”
He adjusted his eyeglasses, and his small eyes seemed enlarged now, unblinking. With that round plump face and those circular thick glasses he was a caricaturist’s ultimate dream: the cherubic owl. “Anyway”—he stretched out the word—“Marcus told me Joshua was loitering around the depot where the drivers bide their time waiting for famous folks like us to snap our fingers. Anyway, Marcus said Joshua wandered in, nosy as hell, and started asking questions of old Willie, our other favorite driver. The one you ignore.”
“And you admit to finding an annoying chatterbox.”
“Words last. Beauty fades.”
“So does my patience, Aleck.”
“Anyway, I gather he demanded Willie tell him where he’d driven folks, in particular, us.”
“Us!” I exclaimed.
“Exactly. Actually, you. He seemed inordinately curious about your habits, my dear. I don’t know why he didn’t ask me. I’ve seen all your bad habits.” Aleck flicked ashes from a cigarette into a tray. “I’m always ready to tell the world about Edna Ferber’s social lapses.”
I bit my lip. “Just what is he up to?”
“A spy, I’m sure. Old Willie, despite his slippage into senility and excessive verbiage, turns out to be a wiry sort, filled with gusto and verve. Like one of your unrealistic oil riggers in Cimarron. When Joshua asked one question too many, Willie punched him in the face and knocked him against the wall.” He smiled. “Hence the injured bird we just spotted looking for a nest.”
“I may start to appreciate Willie,” I said. “But I wonder what’s going on. You and I are not the subjects of any story line.”
“Maybe something’s going on that we
don’t see.”
“That thought scares me, Aleck.”
“Don’t expect me to protect you from that scamp, Ferb. My weapons are words, not fists.”
“If he forces me to parse a sentence at gunpoint, I’ll dial your number.”
***
The next morning Colonel Lindbergh took the stand again. Ten a.m., promptly. His wife wasn’t with him today.
David Wilentz had him recount the reddish clay marks discovered in the nursery. The footprint outside the window. A man’s footprint that the police neglected to measure. The homemade ladder. Letters to Dr. Condon, “Jafsie.” The arrival of the baby’s sleeping garment in the mail. Riveted, the spectators were waiting for the moment when Lindbergh heard the voice of the kidnapper.
Yes, the drive to St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx, waiting in the car while Dr. Condon went by himself to deal with the man who called himself John. Cemetery John. The payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom.
As he sat some three hundred yards away in the car, windows rolled up, Lindbergh heard a thick guttural German voice call out.
“I heard what was clearly a voice calling from the cemetery, to the best of my belief calling Dr. Condon.”
Wilentz paused. “What were the words?”
“In a foreign accent. ‘Hey, Doctor.’”
“Since that time have you heard the same voice?”
“Yes, I have.”
Another dramatic pause.
“Whose voice was it, Colonel, that you heard calling, ‘Hey, Doctor’?”
“It was Hauptmann’s voice,” Lindbergh emphasized.
Turning his head, he stared into Bruno’s face.
Bruno’s body jerked in his seat. The guards on either side of him stiffened.
I looked toward Aleck, who sat enthralled, mouth open. Two and a half years after the kidnapping, I considered, and Lindbergh insisted he’d recognize that voice anywhere. Two words, yelled from a distance in a dark night graveyard.
The room was silent, hypnotized. Glances swept from Lindbergh to a stoic Bruno, eyes locked on his accuser.
The empty hole of time that followed his pronouncement seemed endless and yet a flash of a second.
Looking at the unmoving Bruno Hauptmann, I understood to my marrow that he would die in the electric chair.
Chapter Thirteen
Willie drove me into Manhattan late the next afternoon. I’d scheduled a meeting early that evening with Ernie Miller, set in motion by someone at the Times who knew someone who knew someone else. Ernie Miller, a little rattled at the invitation, agreed to meet me at an Italian bakery on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. He was also promised a crisp twenty-dollar bill, that, my editor informed me, was my own responsibility.
Willie was unusually silent as he cruised along, which surprised me.
“Willie,” I began, “I understand you had a little scuffle with Joshua Flagg.”
He twisted his head around, a thin smile on his face. “Word spreads, no?”
“Your fellow driver Marcus told Aleck Woollcott.”
“Ain’t my proudest moment, I tell you.”
“Sounds wonderful to me. I think that reporter—or whatever he is—is of questionable morals.”
He rubbed the side of his nose and debated what to tell me. “Don’t know about that, ma’am, but I do know I don’t like no folks nosing around and demanding attention.”
I waited a heartbeat. “I hear that he was curious about where you drive us—in particular, me.”
The car slowed and Willie bent his head over the steering wheel. “For a quiet guy, that Marcus yammers up a storm.”
“Well, it does concern me, Willie, wouldn’t you say?”
A long pause. “Guess so. I never got to ask him the why of his question because my temper got the best o’ me.”
I leaned forward and tapped the back of the driver’s seat. “What do you think, though? Why the question?”
Willie glanced back at me. “Hey, we drivers got a job to do. I think he believes you are onto a story that he wants to know about. And he got the idea”—he said idear—“that the drivers is like them—poor folks ready to spill the beans on our customers.”
“But all the reporters are here for the same story, no? The trial of Hauptmann for kidnapping and murder.”
He cut me off, his words rushed. “He asked me if I drove you to Englewood.”
“Next Day Hill? The Morrow estate?”
He nodded. “I told him no, but he said something about that gal what killed herself.”
I sat up. “What?”
“Dunno. Just that name, thrown out like that.” He snickered. “Then we got into it.”
I banged one fist into the palm of my hand. Violet Sharp. Joshua Flagg was pursuing—or monitoring—the same story I was. Hence his pursuit of Annabel and now her roommate, Peggy Crispen.
Willie was mumbling about something.
“What?” I said into his neck. Under his chauffeur’s cap his drab grayish hair looked unwashed, scruffy.
“All this is stuff and nonsense when everyone should be planning the execution of that scoundrel Bruno.”
“I know, I know—you’re convinced he’s guilty. We’ve heard you before.”
His head swung around and the car drifted to the right. “And you ain’t sure?”
“That’s why we are having a trial, Willie.”
“All show, ma’am. If I had my way, he’d been strung from an oak tree in the center of town. And then a party thrown afterwards.”
“Well, perhaps then we should be thankful you’re not the sheriff in town.”
He glanced into the rearview mirror. I made eye contact: anger there, stoniness.
Well, I told myself, I discovered a way to curb Willie’s garrulous tongue, although I probably created yet another soul who’d like to wring my slight and powdered neck. With the three strands of real pearls.
“We are allowed to disagree, Willie.” I spoke into the silence.
“That’s your opinion.” His words were clipped, final. His grip tightened on the steering wheel as we sailed into Manhattan.
***
At my Park Avenue apartment I checked in with my housekeeper, who was surprised to see me traipsing in, rushing around. I checked my mail, drank a cup of coffee, and was thankful my mother was out shopping. She’d frowned on my taking the assignment in Flemington—“You’re a novelist, Edna, not a tabloid scribbler. And that trial, that evil German killer—evil, evil, evil.”
“It’s for the New York Times,” I’d told her.
“No matter. Sometimes they like to sink down into the mud and wallow around, that paper.”
“The Times?”
“Wake up, Edna.”
After my coffee I caught a checkered cab up to the Bronx. The driver balked at the destination, but I’d rapped impatiently on the glass barrier between us, and he became appropriately docile. I’d sent a moody Willie back to Flemington, although he informed me he had to deliver some reporters from the newspaper back down to the town. “Willie’s gadabout service,” he summed up.
I’d be staying overnight in the city, but Marcus Wood would collect me at six in the morning for the trek back to Flemington, arriving in time for the trial.
At seven at night, the streets dark and shadowy under bright streetlights, a wispy fog of sleet swirling in the air, I stepped out onto a busy sidewalk. Arthur Avenue, the roustabout heart of Little Italy in the upper borough. Despite the painful cold and growing threat of heavy nighttime snow, people pushed carts through the cluttered sidewalks, an organ grinder stood outside a small café and sang a Neapolitan ditty. As I strolled by, he extended an arm, thrusting a tin cup at me. I ignored him. “O Solo Mio” was never a favorite of mine. There was a price to be paid for offending my eardrums. Had he had a trained monke
y, I might have offered a pittance. After all, the poor creature needed to be fed.
Ernie Miller had chosen the rendezvous, a corner eatery he favored called Mamma Lucia’s. He knew people there, he’d told the editor at the Times. Home territory.
“Sounds suspect,” Aleck had told me. “You know, Edna dear, there are still persistent rumors that the Mafia and the crime bosses stole that baby. Kidnapping is a favorite pursuit of the mob. The snatch racket. Irving Bitz and Salvatore Spitale and all that sorry crowd. Lindbergh even invited Mickey Rosner, a notorious capo, to Hopewell, thinking the underworld would get his baby back. Or so the rumor goes. Lord, Lindy gave Mickey a copy of the first ransom note, which doubtless allowed every extortionist to jump into the game.”
“I don’t think the Mafia is going to rub me out, Aleck.”
“I know. They’ve refused the thousands and thousands of lira I’ve tossed their way.”
“And Ernie Miller doesn’t sound like he’s a native of Palermo.”
“Really? Ernesto Millerini? I knew him as a lad, playing stick ball on Mulberry Street.” Aleck laughed until spittle seeped from the corner of his mouth. I waved him away.
Now Ernie Miller was waiting for me at a back table, and he didn’t look happy. As I walked in, he stood, waited until I looked around and caught his eye, and he waved me over.
“Mr. Miller?” I approached the table.
He nodded. “I don’t know why you wanna talk to me.”
“I talk to a lot of people. I’m a reporter.”
He had a raspy whine to his voice. “But I don’t know nothing. I told the cops everything. You know, I met Violet Sharp one time, really, I mean, I met her walking and then, well, we went to the speakeasy. One time, almost three years ago, and now I gotta be on the front page of the newspapers.” He mopped a brow with a large handkerchief and slipped back into his chair.
“Thank you, Mr. Miller. I know you had nothing to do with…”
He spat out, “Damn right. Nothing about a kidnapping. But people—they look at me now and point me out.” His lips trembled. “My life will never be the same.”
“Yes, it will,” I assured him. “Once this is over and you’ve had your say, you’ll get back to your life of…”