by Ed Ifkovic
He shivered. “Sort of shook me when they brung me that news, ma’am.”
“So, yes, Annabel’s murder intrigues, but Peggy’s bothers.”
“I see what you mean.” He sat back. “She was a sweet one, that Peggy.”
“And not Annabel?”
Another drag on his cigarette. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, always been warned against it, but”—a feckless grin—“I seem to be doing it all my life, especially since at my age, going on seventy-eight this coming May, I got lots of dead folks around me, and some deserve being spoken of poorly.”
“However…” I prodded.
“Annabel was a just little too loud for me. Not that she made a ruckus in her room. I don’t mean that. I wouldn’t have tolerated it. This is a quiet house.” He grinned. “A little overcrowded these days, but so be it. I mean, she liked to swagger around the hallways, collaring strangers, boasting of this and that. In your business, yammering about the trial and the coins in her pocket from waitressing over to the Union Hotel. But she’s the type what got under your skin, speaks too close to your face, eyes burrowing into you, tell me, tell me, tell me. And you ain’t got nothing to tell her, frankly.”
I smiled. “I guess you didn’t care for her.”
“Not a question of liking anybody. I didn’t trust her. Struck me as someone up to scheming. You know, the shifting eye corners, that cloudy look? Late with her rent so I had to pound on her door. You know what I mean? She told me she was out of here the day they threw the book at Bruno Hauptmann.”
I nodded. “She had her sights on something beyond Flemington.”
“One way to put it. But a pretty gal, that’s for sure. In a hard diamond kind of way, you know—all sharp edges and razor cuts. That bright red lipstick girls wear nowadays—called them hussies in my day. I had no idea why she took up with that tarpaper boy, Cody Lee Thomas, him following her around like a puppy dog, the two of them yelling at each other in the street like barnyard animals. Him from the Sourlands—frontier where Negroes and Indians married folks running away from the law. Annabel tells me how she told him to get lost, don’t let him near the house, and he took it real bad. Then he kills her. Sooner or later somebody was gonna kill a girl like that.”
“Did you see him that night?”
“Nope. Over to my daughter’s in East Amwell. Spent the night listening to Amos ’n’ Andy on her new Zenith. Come back to find Peggy and the cops running up and down the hallways like chickens with their heads cut off.”
“You liked Peggy?”
“What’s not to like about her? Always polite to me. Laughing girl. She talked to me. Young folks look through old folks, you know that. But she was kind of lost, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
He struggled with his words. “Well”—he stretched out the word—“she was always looking up. Or around. I seen her on the sidewalk and someone walks by and she looks at them, like waiting for someone to be her friend. A lonely look on her face. Sort of broke my heart. A plump girl, that Peggy, so fellows didn’t smile at her.”
“I think the manager of the café was fond of her.”
He scoffed. “Yeah, I seen that Casanova slipping around here. Stopping in at her room. When I caught him, he tells me he got to tell her about something about work. Lying to me. I don’t allow no fooling around in my house—I’m a Presbyterian elder myself—but I know it goes on. That man played on her loneliness. One time I saw them whispering on the front stoop, and he bustled away. You know what she said to me? ‘That man only knows how to lie.’ Smart girl, but weak. She let him into her life. Him a married man.”
“She was afraid to stay in her room after the murder.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but I told her it was over and done. The scum in jail for good. But then somebody broke in. That never happened in my house before. And that set her off, dizzy and fretting. She was gonna move out, but where you gonna move in Flemington these days? You can’t. She had to stay put for now.”
“Did you see her the night she died?”
“Early on. Yeah. I’m walking home and I seen her going into the Smiler’s Tavern on the corner. Lots of locals meet there. The owner is a no-account Methodist. I don’t drink, and a young girl ain’t got no business in a tavern. A single woman. Well, any woman. Do you drink, Miss Ferber?”
“A cocktail now and then.”
He squinted his eyes. “Comes from living in a big city, I bet.”
“You bet. A big city is one of the reasons I drink.”
“Real funny. Anyway I go to bed around nine, but I checked the furnace first. I seen her walking up the stairs. She calls to me, a little tipsy, I think. But what do I know? I say good night and she tells me she’s plum tuckered out. She was out looking for a job that day, chance of being a waitress at Smiler’s Tavern. I wait till I hear her close her door, latch it shut. I could hear the snap of the lock. After the robbery, I put another lock on, made her feel safe. I go to bed.”
“So she most likely didn’t wander drunk from that bar into the countryside,” I said, mainly to myself. “She came home.”
“Not ’less she went back out again. And I doubt that.”
“But there was a reason she left the room later that night.”
“Maybe she had to meet someone.”
“Or maybe someone got her to leave.”
A quizzical look on his face. “That seems unlikely, Miss Ferber.”
“I don’t think she left alone.”
“But why?”
“That’s what I intend to find out.”
***
Back at the Union Hotel I heard my name called out. Cora Lee Thomas was sitting on one of the wing chairs by the reception area, her chair turned away from the front window. A tiny woman, she looked lost in the oversized chair, but she’d also tucked herself in, as though hiding from the reporters drifting down from their rooms, her head pressed against the back of the chair.
I walked over. “Mrs. Thomas.”
She glanced around the lobby, already filling with people. “I’ve never been here before. So fancy a place. I didn’t know if I could sit here.”
I smiled. “You’re perfectly welcome here.” I slipped into the wing chair next to her, turned it so I faced her. “Has anything happened?”
Her eyes got moist as she fumbled for a handkerchief, dabbed at them. “I’m sorry.”
I held her hand. “What happened?”
A helpless shrug. “They held that lineup I told you about, Cody Lee standing with these other guys. He says he was the only stocky guy, and so the drummer identified him.” She stared into my eyes. “But that’s impossible. So…so then they told him to confess, and he wouldn’t. I don’t know what that meant, but they said someone has come forward who says he saw Cody Lee and Annabel together in the doorway, arguing. But that had to be a different night. I mean, they argued at the café earlier that night, but he left. She kept working her shift and then went home.”
“Where someone strangled her in the room.”
Cora Lee shuddered and echoed my words. “In the room.” A heartbeat. “He didn’t follow her home because he was with me.”
“You know I believe you, Mrs. Thomas.”
She nodded, a wistful smile making her ragged face come alive. “That’s why I’m here, I guess. You’re the only person who believes me.” She surveyed the lobby. “I wanted to thank you because I got a phone call from this lawyer from Manhattan who said he’s a friend of yours. He’s sending a friend who practices criminal law down here in Hunterdon County, an old school chum of his, a good lawyer, Yale Law, he said, his name is Amos Blunt, he tells me.” Now a wider smile. “Thank you.”
“No matter.”
She looked away, sheepish. “He told me you said you’d cover the…you know.”
“I told you not to wor
ry about that.”
She interlocked her fingers and drew them up to her chin. She sucked in her breath. “People ain’t that kind to other folks anymore, Miss Ferber. With the Depression and all, it’s…like cutthroat out there.”
“I believe you when you say that Cody Lee is innocent.”
Emphatic, her hand tapping the arm of the chair. “Yes, he is.”
“But there’s something else you want to tell me. I can tell.”
Bashful, she glanced away, then tilted her head toward her lap. She wouldn’t look at me. “Cody Lee got himself a temper like his father, sad to say. And he’s restless in that cell, banging into the bars. So I guess he had a little shoving match with the jailer.”
“Oh Lord, that’s not good.”
“I told him that. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I yelled at him. ‘You ain’t looking good that way. They’ll think you’re a violent man, no respect for authority. For laws.’” Her voice fell to a whisper. “When he hit the jailer, he heard that Bruno Hauptmann yell something at him in German. Like he heard the whole thing.”
“What did he say?”
She rolled her head back and forth. “My Cody Lee don’t speak German, but the jailer, he told this Bruno to shut the hell up.”
“Did he?”
“He did. But the jailer made fun of him, saying to Cody Lee, ‘Even that baby killer is a better prisoner than you.’”
***
The café got still when I walked in after the morning session of the trial ended. Aleck sat alone by a window seat, motioned to me, but the look on his face suggested he’d rather be sharing a convivial sandwich with Lizzie Borden. A table of Hearst reporters, huddled nearby, stopped mid-sentence and mid-bite as I moved by, their eyes accusing.
“Pariah,” Aleck said too loudly as I sat down.
I spun around to take in the packed room. Lowell Thomas was chatting with Margaret Bourke-White, both watching me. Douglas Fairbanks was sitting with Clifton Webb, both signing autographs, and thus paying me no mind. Worse, Joshua Flagg sat with his back against a window in a chair set apart from the table, as if he’d been exiled. And, perversely, he was pointing at me, a silly grin on his face. Walter Winchell, wearing ridiculous dark glasses tipped up onto his forehead, was holding court with three others at his table, and his rat-a-tat ticker-tape voice flowed over the heads of the other diners. “Incredible.” At least I believe that was the word he hurled my way.
Of course, I understood the reason.
A copy of that morning’s New York Times lay on different tables, opened to an inside page. In fact, Aleck cavalierly shoved his copy toward me, his fingers anxiously tapping the page. I saw my byline under the provocative headline: “Violet Sharp, A Cautionary Tale.” The editor’s headline, not mine, I hasten to add. I’d submitted it as “Violet Sharp, A Woman of Secrets.” My editor Marvin Loeb said it lacked verve. So does my editor.
No matter the wording, the content of the piece obviously infuriated folks.
My first line: “The world should never forget Violet Sharp.”
No chance of that, these days—in this Fourth Estate gladiators’ ring, all the reporters maneuvering for blood and a scoop.
What I’d done was assemble what few facts we knew about the sad life of the servant in the Morrow household who killed herself rather than be interrogated one more time by Inspector Walsh of the New Jersey police. An abbreviated character sketch of a pretty young girl, described as a little plump but with lovely eyes, maybe an overbite, a woman who came to America to enjoy a better life—one who planned to return to her native England with cash in her pocket to help her parents. A young woman who liked to dance and go to the movies and to frequent illegal roadhouses. Nothing unusual there—most young folks did so in that restrictive era of Prohibition. Innocents all. An innocent abroad. But a young woman caught in the horrible fabric of the Lindbergh kidnapping, swept into the confusions of guilt and mistrust and accusation. It was too much for her. The first “insider” accused by Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf, who stated his conviction that she was party to the kidnapping, although he later changed his mind.
A familiar story, a few years old now, but brought back into the light by the current trial. A profile of an aborted life. I wondered in the last paragraph if Violet Sharp had died with a secret.
But obviously I’d overstepped some line.
“Edna, how could you?” From Aleck, stewing and eyeing me over the rim of his coffee cup.
“I’m a journalist.”
“You’re a provocateur.”
I chuckled. “Rather extreme, no, Aleck?”
“Look around you, my dear.”
I did: censorious eyes, frowns, pursed lips, the claque of disapproval.
“Edna, your portrait of that sad suicide deflects from the horrors of the crime at hand. You’ve opened a raw wound. Everyone is reading between the lines—you’re impugning the aviator himself. Everyone is focused on Hauptmann and Lindbergh, and you pen some melancholic song to a dead beautiful girl. Edgar Allan Poe you are not.”
“Aleck, I didn’t mention any of the”—I dropped my voice to a whisper—“the business with Annabel and the letters from cousin Violet to her. There’s no mention of Dwight and the Morrow household. Certainly nothing about Blake Somerville and Violet’s infatuation with him.”
I watched his face carefully. He drew his lips into a tight line, flicking his head as if to suggest I might be overheard. “You mention her sister, Emily—her flight back to England.”
“So what? All I did was write about a young woman’s sudden place in the whirlpool of a national tragedy. It’s a morality tale. The common man suddenly, well, thrust onto the front page. Out there. A girl horrified.”
He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “You’re talking nonsense.”
I looked around. “I really didn’t expect my article to create such a furor.”
“Thousands of words are produced every day, Edna. A million words a day are telegraphed from Flemington. Every scrap of information on Lindbergh and Hauptmann, real and imagined, makes its way into the press. But, as you’ve noticed, all the sympathies are with Lindbergh and the Morrows. With Charles and Anne. I myself described Anne Lindbergh on the witness stand as—as a wistful Madonna.”
“You’re a sentimentalist, Aleck.”
His jaw dropped. “Your focus on the dead girl suggests…well, secreted information, a story not fully told.”
I stormed, “Well, Aleck, that’s exactly how I view it.”
He thundered back, “But that’s wrong.”
“Who are you to tell me I’m being ridiculous?”
He sighed. “Edna, we are friends.”
“You sound doubtful.”
A thin smile as he adjusted his tiny glasses on his cheeks. “We’ve had our bitter moments, our battles royal, but I do get protective of your rash behavior. On occasion.”
I seethed. “I’ve never done a rash thing in my life.” A pause. “Save, perhaps, befriend you.”
Aleck eyed me curiously, silent, one hand fingering the cigarette holder he’d extracted from his breast pocket. Instead, he struggled to stand, though he announced in a loud voice, “Nevertheless, I will accompany you tomorrow, as planned. Your capricious pursuit of nonsense. It’ll do me good to leave this sad hamlet for greener pastures. I’ve appropriated Marcus and the car tomorrow. Marcus is ours for the whole day. A foolish venture, but nevertheless I promised you I’d arrange things.”
“Thank you, Aleck.”
Tomorrow, a quiet Sunday, I planned to visit Montclair Manor, the asylum where Dwight Morrow and Blake Somerville had been patients. Earlier Aleck had told me he knew a retired nurse who lived in the area. He’d make a few phone calls, set up a meeting. “Frivolous,” he’d told me, but I persisted. In an aside he’d said, “She took care of Zelda Fitzgerald there. She
violated that confidence, and doubtless she’ll violate every other confidence. A couple of free front-row theater tickets, and the woman will do electric shock on Helen Hayes. Which would enliven any party, frankly. The woman has few scruples. The two of you should get along famously. I’m only going because I want to watch the two of you engage in a battle of wits.”
Quietly, “Thank you again.”
“Marcus will call for us at seven. I told him to appropriate a road map. For all his Valentino looks, the lad is a provincial—he knows only Trenton and Newark and workable parts of Manhattan. Montclair is wilderness to him.”
I repeated, “Thank you.”
“But don’t expect me to be pleasant on the long, long ride.”
“I wouldn’t expect the axis of the earth to shift.”
Aleck lumbered out of the café, leaving me alone at the table. As he walked by Walter Winchell’s table, I noticed the pesky reporter wave to him, as if in recognition of Aleck’s decision to abandon the heretic Ferber.
I sat alone, nursing a cup of coffee and feeling strangely triumphant, isolated from that swelling, gaping crowd. Horace Tripp walked by, a sheaf of menus in his hand, and he glanced down at me. I started to say something—another expression of sympathy at the death of Peggy, perhaps—but he was looking away. When the waiter asked me what I wanted to eat, I said nothing. Just coffee. A table for four with me alone, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee. He didn’t look happy.
A short time later Walter Winchell rose, and his entourage trooped out ahead of him. He lingered, shuffled near my table, and, unbidden, dropped into the chair Aleck had vacated.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“The question is, can I help you?”
“You first.” My winsome smile broke at the edges.
“I read your piece in the Times,” he began. “We all did. Probably Colonel and Mrs. Lindbergh. Colonel Schwarzkopf. It smacked of rampant sentimentality, some sob sister posturing on your part. You depict this—this Violet Sharp as some faded ingénue from one of your romances. Why is that, Miss Ferber? The only thing lacking would be harps playing and angels singing her to heaven.”