by Ed Ifkovic
***
At the Union Hotel, Marcus graciously extended his arm as I lumbered out of the car. He whispered, “You look tired, Miss Ferber.”
I smiled. “A troubling night.”
That puzzled him. “A night in Manhattan always enchants me.”
“Yes, well, that’s not the word I’d use for last night.”
Alcck Woollcott was waiting for me in the lobby, sitting in the reception area, a cloud of smoke around his head and a plate of sugar doughnuts nearby. He toasted me with a cup of coffee. “Right on time, dear Ferb.”
I leaned in. “Aleck, someone tried to kill me last night.”
He scrunched up his face. “Again? Edna, you have to stop annoying people.”
“I’m serious, Aleck. A car crossed traffic and bumped me.”
The smirk disappeared from his face. “This is true, Edna?”
“I swear.” A heartbeat. “Or I assumed it’s true. Perhaps it was an accident, a wayward car, out of control, some drunken maniac, but I felt its driver was purposely aiming toward me.”
Aleck leaned over and patted me on the wrist. “Edna, perhaps this…caper of yours has now assumed dangerous proportions.”
I snarled, “But what? It’s not a caper. I’m asking questions. For God’s sake, Aleck. The story of Violet Sharp…”
He stopped me. “It’s obviously too raw a story still. There are too many loose ends here.” He struggled to stand. “Are you attending the trial?”
“Not this morning. I’ll be in my room. You can fill me in later at lunch. Or this afternoon.”
An hour later, refreshed with breakfast, I walked to the depot and found Willie polishing a town car. I engaged him for late that afternoon, although he remarked that Kathleen Norris had suggested she wanted a ride to Trenton for an interview. “But” he leaned in, “that lady novelist never leaves town. She’s glued to the courtroom and Nellie’s Taproom, afraid she’ll miss some choice morsel of gossip. The bourbon and applejack crowd likes to chatter. So I don’t expect her to bother me today. It’s just me today. Marcus is off. He likes to get out of town—too many people in the small town, he says—and drink rum Coke in a country inn where no reporters ever go. Me, well, I like the crowds, the excitement, spotting Colonel Lindbergh strolling by, even seeing that Bruno Hauptmann led across the street to the courtroom, him all spruced up with that new fedora, sullen like a beat puppy, shuffling between the state cops. They should dress him in rags.”
“Anyway,” I interrupted,“five o’clock?”
“I’ll write it down now, ma’am. Car’s all yours.”
Unless, I thought, Kathleen Norris actually does demand a journey out of town. A friendly woman, Kathleen Norris was. We’d shared a moment in the lobby, and she’d slipped me the copy for tomorrow’s Times column. My eyes had caught the lines:
“The big story is on its way to every corner of the world.”
Then:
“There is a steady deepening tension and a steady increasing horror in the Flemington courthouse as the most unfortunate man in the world makes a fight for his life.”
For a moment, reading those lines and watching her eager but humble face, I was sadly jealous. I wanted those lines to be mine. Well, maybe not. She was actually a warm, likeable woman—and much too pleasant to spend a lot of time with because such genuine affability strained the muscles used for smiling. Niceness is best applied in small, manageable doses.
When I sat with Aleck at lunch, I outlined my plan: an early evening spin to the Peanut Grill, a place that intrigued me. “Perhaps you’d enjoy the ride?”
Aleck wasn’t happy. “Really, Edna. If someone takes a potshot at you, they’ll probably hit me. I’m a much larger target.”
“But your infamous cutting remarks have given you a tough hide no bullet can penetrate.”
“Ah,” he grinned, “the insulation of the choice bon mot?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, that doesn’t really comfort me, but, yes, I could do with a drink and a look at a place stupidly called the Peanut Grill. Perhaps Violet Sharp etched her initials into the sticky woodwork.” He reached for a cigarette. “Lord, my dear, this wild goose chase you’re on.”
“Clues, Aleck.” I thought of my conversation with Ernie Miller, which I summarized to Aleck. “I want to meet a guy named Joe.”
“Don’t we all,” Aleck muttered.
“Tell me what happened at the trial,” I began.
Aleck discussed the morning testimony. David Wilentz began his stream of witnesses calculated to place Bruno at the Lindbergh estate—a crucial bit of courtroom stretching. Otherwise—what proof was there? Circumstantial? The morning session, according to Aleck, featured craggy old Dr. Condon, the nicknamed “Jafsie,” the ruddy-faced gentleman who’d delivered the ransom money in the Bronx cemetery. The doddering old man, self-important and bombastic and garrulous, was entertaining, Aleck said. Early on, during a police lineup in New York—twelve burly cops with no accents, and one tiny unshaven man named Bruno—he’d hesitated. He’d refused to identify Bruno at the time. “He is not the man. He resembles the man. I can see a resemblance, but I cannot swear to it.” Odd, given that he’d spoken face-to-face with “John” for an hour. But on the stand, though Wilentz was visibly nervous, Dr. Condon emphatically named Bruno as the man he met in the cemetery.
“Just how foolish is Bruno, then?” I now said to Aleck. “He wears gloves at the kidnapping site, conceals his identity a number of times, and then talks straight-on for an hour, undisguised. Really, Aleck!”
“Well, the doctor made a show of it, what with announcing that the Bronx was the most beautiful borough in the world.” A sigh. “Then he pointed at Bruno and said—yes, that’s ‘John.’ With his gigantic white moustache and a black bowler on his huge body, he seemed a circus performer.”
I checked my watch. “Let’s go. The afternoon session begins.”
A tedious afternoon. Although Aleck nodded his head in agreement as witnesses against Bruno Hauptmann streamed past, I found myself wondering: Amandus Hochmuth, a frail eighty-seven-year-old man who claimed he saw Bruno speeding by in a car at Hopewell three years back, yet seemed myopic, squinting through cataracts to focus on a photograph displayed before him. The speeding man had a bright red face, he insisted—and everyone turned to look at Bruno: pale white, pasty. Someone tittered. He tugged at his gray Van Dyke goatee, and tottered down to place a hand on Bruno’s knee and pressed down hard, probably to avoid toppling over. The tip of his beard grazed Bruno’s forehead. Very dramatic, if ridiculous. The reward money, I thought. A siren’s awful lure for mountain folks. Bruno muttered, “Der Alte ist verrückt.” The old man is crazy.
Worse, an illiterate mountain man from the tarpaper shacks in Sourland, a bumbling sort, easily rattled, recalled a strange man wandering through the woods at Hopewell, a man some three years later he insisted was Bruno. Others testified that the witness was a chronic liar, and only had the wonderful recollection when reward money materialized. A fool, I thought, unconvincing.
A third witness, Joseph Perrone, was the taxi driver in the Bronx who delivered a letter to Dr. Condon. When he walked down and touched Bruno on the shoulder, Bruno roared, “You’re a liar.”
Perrone had identified Bruno in another New York lineup that included two cops, one in uniform.
“Circumstantial evidence.” I jotted in a note to Aleck. “Is Wilentz serious?”
He scribbled back. “Nitpicking, Edna.” He took back the sheet from me and added, in barely legible penmanship, “Like your current pursuit of the elusive and departed Violet Sharp. Circumstantial evidence.”
“I rest my case.”
***
Willie made a grunting sound as he pulled the town car in front of the Peanut Grill, parking it a little too close to a bank of pale green yew bushes speckled with ice-hoar
y red berries. We sat there, the three of us, as Aleck poked me in the side, whispering loudly, “The site of our first date. Do you remember, Edna, my love?”
“No,” I shot back, “your memory is slipping, dear Aleck. That was the dessert table at the Algonquin, if I remember correctly. And your cheeks were puffed out with chocolate éclairs.”
He chuckled. “We looked into each other’s eyes.”
“Yes, when you pledged your love to…chocolate.”
“A love of chocolate is enduring. A love of you is fickle.”
Willie was still grunting, his fingers fiddling with a cigarette he was about to light. “You folks gonna jaw the afternoon away in the backseat like two schoolgirls over Francis X. Bushman?”
We got out of the car.
The Peanut Grill struck me as a frontier cabin, a sloping roof of tired, moss-stained shingles, an ice slick at the eaves, tiny windows the size of a folio page. Peeling clapboards painted a ghastly forest green, the boards sagging, some slipping, nails giving way. Over the front door—built of a wide slab of rough, unsanded pine with wrought-iron handles—a crudely painted sign: The Peanut Grill. For some reason someone had added an “e” in black crayon to the word: “Grille.”
“Ambience?” I said out loud.
“Very Tobacco Road,” Aleck announced. “I can already feel the mildew seeping into my heart.”
Inside was no better, though thankfully the late afternoon shadows and the faint lighting gave the interior a monastic feel. Plank tables and barrel-stave chairs cluttered a sawdust-splattered floor. A long oak bar ran the length of the room, a glass tier behind it, with etched mirror and, for some reason, a cheap chromolithographic print of a Conestoga covered wagon being attacked by savage Indians. Perhaps, after all, we were in Wyoming. Or, at least, frontier New York.
“Does Manhattan really exist?” Aleck mumbled.
“It’s only a state of mind, anyway,” I told him.
There was not a single customer in sight. A man stood behind the bar, busy wiping glasses and stocking the glass shelves. He turned suddenly, shielding his eyes at the burst of sunlight from the opened front door. “We’re not really open,” he called to us.
“Well, we’re not really here,” I announced.
A woman was wiping down tables. “What does that mean?”
“We came to talk, not drink.”
The man glanced at the woman. “Mostly people come here to do both.” He stepped out from behind the car and approached us. “We’re closed Mondays,” he said. “Says so on the sign outside. Door should have been locked.” He wore a simple smile. “But can I help you?”
“Are you Joe?” I asked.
That puzzled him. “Joe?” A pause. “Oh, like the man who works weekends? Joey Warehouse. That ain’t his last name, but he works…never mind…an older guy, walrus moustache, real fat face.”
I interrupted. “I’ve never met him, but a friend of his named Ernie told me to ask for him.”
“Well, he ain’t here. Sorry.” He turned away.
“But perhaps you can help us.”
He turned back. “Suit yourself. Park yourself down in those seats. Be with you in a second.”
So parked we did, though Aleck made a fuss over the wobbly chair he chose, teetering on the edge, his tremendous bulk shifting like a seismic ocean current, and I noticed the woman eyeing him nervously. Settled in, breathing heavily, Aleck reached for his cigarette holder and inserted a Camel. He struck a match. He snapped his fingers as he called to the woman who was now stacking glasses on a sideboard.
“Does this mean we can’t drink? I will have a brandy. And a dry martini for my woman friend, the former head of the Upper East Side Temperance League and All-Around Street Litter Patrol.”
The woman watched the man who shrugged and said, “All right.”
When she went up to the bar, I noticed she winked at him, and he smiled broadly, turning away. Young lovers, I thought, playful and happy to be alive. When she returned with the brandy and the martini—I watched the bartender deftly pour from a bottle, his wrist dramatically exaggerated—she said, “Here you go.” An accent, decidedly Irish. “And you are from Europe?”
“County Cork.” A half-bow. “Mary Louise, though my friends call me Marielle. Mary L. M-a-r-i-e-l-l-e is how I spell it. Understand?”
“It’s not that complicated,” Aleck said.
She pointed to the bartender. “He’s Charlie. From Newark.”
Charlie, dragging a rag across the bar, bowed with a flourish.
An attractive couple, mid-thirties perhaps, she with a pointy freckled face and washed-out brown hair. He with a high forehead over sleepy blue eyes and a pronounced chin, a mouth with a mess of wrinkles around it. A broad-chested man, short, a street fighter with a bit of a scar under his left eye. They looked like they belonged together.
“You two plan on getting married?” I asked, disingenuously.
That surprised her, and she blushed, hurled a sidelong glance at Charlie, who chuckled. “I guess we are now.” He pointed playfully at Marielle. “Gotta listen to the customers, no?”
Laughing, embarrassed, she shook her head back and forth.
“Well, you should,” I said.
Marielle seemed pleased. I was the yenta she’d hoped for—a role I savored.
Aleck eyed me suspiciously. “Edna dear, why must all of your talks lead to matters amorous? The title of your biography will have to be—Nothing Risqué, Nothing Gained.”
I ignored him.
“You two married?” Marielle looked from Aleck to me.
Aleck spat out his brandy, choked, dropped his cigarette holder. “Please,” he howled, “can’t you see I’m a man of utter discernment?”
That confused her, so she turned away and chose not to answer.
Enough of the tomfoolery, I thought. Willie would shortly be leaning on the horn, impatient. But I knew I’d won over these two young souls.
“We’re reporters,” I began. “I’m Edna Ferber and this is Aleck Woollcott.”
Marielle sputtered. “Lord, Mr. Woollcott, I listen to you Sundays on the radio. Charlie, you know who this is? The Town Crier.” Charlie shrugged. “You’re so funny.”
“Edna Ferber has written novels,” Aleck began slowly. “Doubtless you haven’t heard of her.”
Marielle shook her head. “No, sorry.”
I plunged in. “No matter, my dear. We’re researching the Lindbergh kidnapping case.” Marielle’s face fell and she glanced at Charlie, who also attempted to look solemn. “We know that Violet Sharp, the maid from the Morrow estate who killed herself, was here with Ernie Miller the night of the kidnapping.”
Marielle’s face closed up. “Yeah, we talked to the police already. They asked about it. We said, yeah, the four of them were here.”
“You remember her?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, when she spoke she had that English accent, and she heard my Irish one, and we laughed and she told me her name.”
“That night?”
A heartbeat. “Well, no. She was here before when I was working one night. Waiting tables. We talked and all.”
“She was a regular?” I wondered.
She nodded. “Well, not a regular. But she liked the place.”
“A drinker?”
“That was strange. Always coffee. Strong, black. No sugar. Like she was afraid. But everyone else with her liked a shot of whiskey and a beer. That was when we were a speakeasy. So we had to be careful.”
I held my breath. “She came with others?”
“Well, that one time with that guy and his friends. You know, the night of the kidnapping. That was what the cops asked about. But she came a few other times with two guys. The rich boys.”
“Rich boys?”
Marielle pulled up a chair and sat down, res
ting her elbows on the table. “Well, you know how she worked for the Morrows. Everyone did. She talked about that. Real proud of it, as she told me. She loved working there. And one day she comes in with their son, a boy named Dwight. I’d seen him before because he’d stopped in with friends. But she introduced him as her boss, then she giggled.”
I was perplexed. “Isn’t that strange, a servant coming to a speakeasy with her employer?”
She looked toward Charlie, who stood behind the bar, grim-faced, uneasy. “Maybe so. Hey, in those days all sorts come into a speakeasy. It was like a place to go, no matter who you are. I mean, she was respectful and all. She even called him Mr. Morrow. I remember that. I thought it odd. He’s drinking with his friend, and she’s acting like she should serve them.”
I waited a second. “His friend?”
“Yeah, another rich guy. He came a lot. Dwight, now and then, and he always looked lost. Like he shouldn’t be here. Now don’t get me wrong. Violet Sharp only came a few times, maybe. I can’t be sure. But it was clear she had a hankering for the other guy.”
“And he was?”
“Blake something. That’s what he said to call him. He let everyone know he was rich, come from a great family and all. I mean, he made like he was friends with the owners of this place. Maybe he was. Angelo Riscinito, his name.” She whispered now. “He was cronies with regulars, guys named Irish Pete and another we called The Chink.” She dropped her voice even lower. “Mobsters out of Mulberry Street.” A sudden smile. “They don’t come here no more—now that we’re legal.”
“Dwight?” I prompted.
“Dwight kept his mouth shut, the few times he was here, talking quietly to everybody, real polite to me, but Blake boomed and roared.”
“What did he say?”
“It wasn’t so much what he said, but the way he said it. That was one good-looking man, let me tell you, slick as all outdoors. Suave, like a movieland star. Dressed to the nines, hoity-toity, slicked-back hair all shiny and polished. Pointed black Italian shoes. A diamond stickpin. Always an expensive cigarette holder between his fingertips.”