by Ed Ifkovic
“Annabel’s greed didn’t mean she should die.”
“Of course it did. Not an unpleasant chore, I might add. She never knew what hit her.” A sickly smile. The gun wavered in his hand. “Well, I guess she did, after all. It was just fortuitous that she had that hillbilly boyfriend and that they fought all the time.”
“The letters?”
“The letters,” he echoed. “I got all but the one that was most important. A cagey woman, that one. To be sure, I didn’t break into that room. After she was dead, I couldn’t take any chances. I watched the building.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had help. Another acolyte who did my bidding. He searched for that lethal letter.”
“And who is that?”
He laughed. “You ask too many questions, Miss Ferber. Someone else in town, a nameless soul who bowed before my commands.”
“But you never got that last letter, did you?”
The hand on the gun twitched. “Of course I did. Dear Peggy Crispen, a wanderer onto the stage who wasn’t even aware that there was a play going on. It’s amazing what a gun pointed into a chest will do.” He waved it at me. “Case in point, no? Anyway, she handed over the letter and pleaded for her life.”
“But you killed her.”
“Well, I couldn’t have another murder. The hillbilly was in jail. ‘Get your coat, Peggy. Let’s go for a drink.’ I walked her to the fields, made her take off her coat, let her wander away, terrified, crying, until she stumbled from the cold, fell. A bottle of booze poured down her throat. And I waited until she fell asleep in the snow. A quiet, peaceful death, most desirable compared to Annabel’s. And, I might add, Little Lindy, the boy Eaglet.”
“You’re a horrible man.”
“But a clever one.”
“A murderer.”
“Confession time. I tried to run you over when you were snooping around the Bronx, talking to that Ernie Miller. You came this close”—with his free hand he held forefinger and index finger together—“to solving the mystery. You started to know too much. I could hear it in your comments. Your little excursions out of town. Sooner or later you’d point the finger at me.” He pointed to the glossy photograph with his gun. “I knew that moment would come.” He smirked. “As I say, you are a dangerous woman.”
My hand grazed the door latch.
“Don’t try it, lady. And now we have to say good-bye.”
A scream caught in the back of my throat. A banging. Someone rapped on the window of the car. So rapt was Marcus in his confession that he’d failed to notice Aleck Woollcott shuffling up to the car, out of breath, peeved.
Aleck was peering at me through the window. “Really, Edna. You know I need the car. Are you going to sit and yammer with Marcus all night? I told you I need the car. Your love affair with this…this lady-killer gigolo is a little embarrassing.” He went on and on, pounding on the window.
Marcus, bewildered, had pulled back the gun, rattled, but in that instant, he shifted into first gear, released the clutch, and pressed on the accelerator.
He shot me a look. “I think it’s time I disappeared from this town.”
He maneuvered the car off the street. Suddenly he threw the car into neutral, pushed open his door, and he bounded out. The car moved forward.
Aleck, startled, jumped back, toppled against a pole. “What in the world?” he shouted.
Helpless, bouncing in the backseat, I struggled as the car plunged forward, jumped the curb, gained momentum as it hit an ice slick. Marcus had parked up from a brick-and-cement municipal gas station, a huge block of deadly stone situated down a small incline. I cried out as the car careened across the sheet of ice and slammed the building, the left side of the car crumbling. A window shattered, glass shards ripping into my arm. Frantic, bleeding, I pushed against the door, which was jammed.
A red-faced Aleck, breathing hard, his eyes ablaze with confusion, struggled with the door, wrenched it free, reached in and grabbed my arm. “Edna, what madness…?” He tugged at my arm, and a wash of blood covered his forearm. Using both hands he pulled me from the backseat and he reeled, dragging me a few steps.
“Move,” I gasped. “We have to move.”
We staggered toward the sidewalk, hobbling, hanging onto each other, my blood smearing his clothing, but then I heard a violent whoosh and pop. Turning, I watched the car burst into a ball of flame, an impact that caused the two of us to topple into a snowbank. Aleck lay on his back, blubbering, while I lay, bloodied and panting, straddling his tremendous belly.
I opened my eyes to face Aleck’s astonished glare.
“Really, Edna,” he managed to get out, “don’t you think this is a little forward of you?”
Chapter Twenty-five
Marcus Wood disappeared that afternoon, and he was never seen again. There were rumors that he’d sailed to Europe under a different name, which was possible. But I know that no one ever pursued him. I learned that he was spotted boarding the afternoon Black Diamond Express of the Lehigh Valley train, leaving Flemington—no suitcase, only the clothing on his back—headed for New York City. A few days later the livery company received a cursory note, scribbled on lined schoolboy paper, saying he’d not be returning to work. He was “embarrassed”—his word—by his own cowardly behavior. After all, it was his fault the car had inadvertently been left in gear. Mea culpa. Forgive me. I can’t show my face. Alas. Thank God, Miss Ferber is a trooper. No one cared, tsking about the young man who almost killed the famous novelist.
No one followed up on it because, alarmingly and devastatingly, no one believed the story I told that afternoon.
The accident was a back-page story in the Hunterdon County Democrat—even less attention than Annabel’s murder warranted, I noted. Immediately afterwards I was rushed to the clinic behind the jail, patched up, scrapes on my face and arms, an unsightly black-and-blue lump on my forehead, but otherwise intact. Dazed, I demanded that the sheriff of the county visit me, but that never happened. Deputy Hovey Low stopped in, listened to my story, lit a cigar, and left. Doubtless, he thought I was crazed or stunned by the accident. Woozy from the morphine. Aleck became a hero, of course, with his wide-eyed face beaming from a photograph that appeared in the Times. “Celebrated Raconteur Saves Novelist in Fiery Mishap.” He wrote the copy and insisted it be run.
Mishap, indeed.
That picture and the accompanying article rankled.
Because no one listened to me. Through my narcotic haze, I mumbled, “I want Marcus Wood arrested for kidnapping and murder.”
No one listened. A few nurses’ heads shook back and forth, as they nodded to one another. The woman is delirious.
Well, I was. And rightfully so.
But my story was lost in the chaos that greeted the decision by the jury later that evening. The case had gone to the jury at 11:23 that morning, and at 10:45 that night they read the verdict. The thirty-two-day trial had ended. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was convicted of first-degree murder and, in short order, Judge Trenchard sentenced him to the electric chair during the week of March 18, 1935. There was no other news story. To be sure, I didn’t know the story until the next morning when I read it in the newspaper. But groggy, lying in a hospital bed, I could hear the hoopla and roar of the street life as celebrants chanted and applauded and howled their pleasure that Bruno would die. A cry for blood. Horns blared, whistles blew, the sound of banging on walls. Pandemonium. Dimly I heard the horrible chants: kill him kill him kill him. I drifted off with those words echoing in my brain. I woke, still dazed from the medication, surveyed my bandaged arm and head, and waited.
A radio in the lounge was turned up. There was a popular broadcaster I sometimes heard—and lamented. He’d sing the news, the more horrible the more melodic he waxed. Now, to my horror, I heard his lilting voice: “I read in the papers that Hauptmann’s gonna die.”
Someone hurriedly switched off the station.
I waited for Aleck to visit me, but he never did. Bruised, tired, I left the clinic later that morning. I checked out of the hotel, and a driver I’d never seen before delivered me safely to Manhattan.
Then began my long campaign to be heard—to be believed. Days later, I sat with Sheriff Curtiss in his small office and told him my tale, my words sounding preposterous as I said them. The murder of Annabel Biggs and Peggy Crispen, Marcus Wood being Blake Somerville—“That’s a rich family, ma’am”—and even a careful mention of Dwight Morrow, Jr. As I watched him, his eyes got cloudy and faraway, and I knew my visit was futile. “Are you listening?” I begged. That stiffened his posture but not his resolve. After my recitation, admittedly a little hysterical and repetitive because my head still swam, the sheriff nodded politely, and dismissed me.
“I don’t think we should talk about this with anyone.” His exit line, which infuriated me.
“But there is a miscarriage of justice. Bruno Hauptmann.”
“Is a convicted killer, Miss Ferber. He’s sentenced to die.”
“For a murder he did not commit.” I drew in my breath. “And Cody Lee Thomas, sitting now in a jail in Trenton awaiting trial, is innocent of Annabel’s killing. Marcus Wood admitted to me…a prank gone bad, the ransom money, the ladder that wasn’t really a ladder…”
“And this disappeared Marcus is really Blake Somerville, a guy whose father is a banker in Newark and was lieutenant governor some years back?”
Helpless. “Yes.”
He scratched his head. “Ma’am, I mean no disrespect, and I know you’re…like famous and all, but this is a little bit crazy talk. Let’s you and me not talk about this anymore.” Like everyone else in Flemington—perhaps even in New Jersey, indeed, all of America—he was glad the Lindbergh kidnapping case was finally over, the blood-letting finished, the headlines gone, though a sour taste lingered in the mouth, ashes on the tongue. Leave it alone. Bruno was guilty.
I wrote long letters to Governor Hoffman, pleading my case, asking for a meeting with him. Our clandestine meeting was polite but not productive. Governor Hoffman had his own serious reservations about the fairness of the Hauptmann verdict, believed the trial had been biased, evidence fabricated or tampered with, and had hired his own detectives to get to the bottom of it. A sensible, decent man who risked his political future—he was predicted to be a candidate for President of the United States one day—he even met with Bruno Hauptmann for one hour on October 16, a meeting that garnered censorious comment and reprisal. Bruno begged for a lie detector test, for truth serum. “I am innocent.”
Hoffman became convinced Hauptmann was a fall guy, perhaps for someone in the Lindbergh or Morrow households, but, as he told me, evidence was not forthcoming. He interviewed trial witnesses, including the old man who claimed he spotted Hauptmann’s car near Hopewell, but the old man mistook a vase in the room for a person—he was, indeed, blind. Hoffman suffered a dismal fate—threats of impeachment, editorial condemnation.
“I’m sorry, Miss Ferber,” he told me sympathetically, “I’m up against a brick wall.”
“Do you believe me?” I pleaded.
“It no longer matters what I believe.”
Worse, what was intended as a confidential conversation was leaked out, and the news-hounds had a joyous time of it. Though they lacked details and someone actually made the connection of Annabel Biggs with her cousin Violet Sharp, the tabloid chatter was brutal. “Edna Ferber’s car crash allowed her to have hallucinations.” That was a mild response.
Walter Winchell, not a fan of me to begin with, chortled and bellowed on his radio program. “Miss Flubber,” he termed me. Another time: “Miss Fibber.” Fannie Hurst was overheard mocking me at a cocktail party attended by George Kaufman. She did a mean-spirited impression of me after the accident, exclaiming, “I know the name of the killer. I know the name of the killer. It’s…it’s Aleck Woollcott.”
Aleck himself refused to speak with me for over a year, though he routinely enacted his brave rescue, a farcical pantomime done in Manhattan parlors, the rotund man shuffling his feet and yanking a resistant and yammering Edna Ferber from the backseat of a burning car. “Save me, oh save me, my chivalric hero.”
I found none of it amusing. Liberty magazine survived for a few years on a wealth of articles written by everyone involved in the Lindbergh case, though most were ghost-written by some hack. Probably Woollcott. Garish headlines and gripping paragraphs lit up the journalistic skies. Inevitably someone penned a semi-serious piece about the various conspiracy theories that attended the trial. There were folks claiming the dead baby was not Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The real baby was being raised somewhere in America. Of course, Attorney Reilly had never challenged the identification of the baby’s body. Or the Nazis had orchestrated the kidnapping to get Lindbergh to support Hitler’s regime. Anne’s sister, Elisabeth, a sickly woman who suffered her own attack of fancy, had smashed the baby to the floor in a rage. Lindbergh himself killed the baby because it was deformed, and he believed in eugenic purity, especially befitting an American hero. Or the baby was deaf, the result of Anne flying in those rattletrap airplanes. We also learned that Lindbergh was partially deaf from those early flights—which made me wonder about his facile identification of Hauptmann’s distant voice. “Hey, Doctor.” Or the Mafia was involved. The President of the United States played a role. Japan killed the child to deflect attention of her invasion of China. Julius Streiden in The Storm Trooper was certain Jews nabbed the baby for blood sacrifice.
Crazies slithered out of the woodwork. Fortunetellers and clairvoyants and tarot card readers and those who entertained visions—all provided cheap amusement for the sensation-hungry masses. And, according to the author of the Liberty piece, one of the most bizarre was from Edna Ferber, an otherwise estimable novelist, whose traumatic head injuries compelled her to slip into the land of carnival sideshow and circus acts at the Hippodrome. His sub-heading: “The Chauffeur Who Tried to Kill Me—and Everyone Else.”
Lindbergh fled America with his family to England, an exile he blamed on Governor Hoffman’s harassment.
I wrote more indignant letters, maddened, but finally, waking up one morning and realizing it was all folly, I stopped.
Yet a month or so later I received a letter from Alice Jamison, the nurse at Montclair Manor. Included with her brief note was a photograph torn from the pages of Look magazine, a photographic essay of the Hauptmann trial with appropriate—bombastic, cruel and dismissive—commentary from Aleck Woollcott. The clipping showed a panoramic shot of the reporters and hangers-on at Nellie’s Taproom, with Walter Winchell in the foreground, his supercilious mug dominating. But Alice had drawn a red circle around one of the onlookers, standing to the side, his back up against a wall, not really a part of the larger group, his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted to the side.
It was Joshua Flagg.
Her note said that she was stunned to see him, that grainy image flashed to a memory of his stay at the Montclair Manor, the young, jittery man who’d followed Blake Somerville around, doing his nasty bidding. A disturbed young man who begged the slick Somerville for favor. Joshua Flagg, whose real name was Ezra Cilley, the youngest son of a Chicago editor and heir to the Myer Chocolate Syrup fortune. A young man who was released shortly after Blake disappeared. His family claimed he never returned home. They didn’t seem too bothered by his absence.
“I always thought him dangerous,” she concluded.
In the middle of a hot August I stepped out of a taxi on Fifth Avenue, headed for Passy’s Restaurant with my nieces, when I spied Horace Tripp sauntering by. I waved at him, and he realized who I was. “Ah, Miss Ferber. The famous resident of the Union Hotel.”
“Mr. Tripp, the erstwhile manager of the café.”
He drew his lips into a thin line, unhappy. “Bitter day.”<
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Dressed in a flashy summer suit, white linen with oversized gold buttons, a flamboyant scarlet handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket, a slicked-back haircut that betrayed his increasing baldness, Horace took a step away from me, his hand raised as though hailing a cab.
“The last time I saw you, well, you’d been axed.”
He thrust out his lips, a little-boy pout. “And abandoned by my faithful wife.”
“Did Martha ever follow up her story to the sheriff of how you left the hotel the night Annabel was murdered?”
Nervous, he looked over his shoulder, frowned at a woman who glanced his way as she passed. “Yes.” But he laughed. “He asked where she was.”
“So nothing came it of.”
A smug, satisfied look. “Well, so far as I know, Cody Lee Thomas was the one they convicted of first-degree murder.”
With that, he sailed forward, and I watched his retreating back. At the corner, standing in the shadow of a news kiosk, a woman called out to him. He hurried up to her, and they hugged. He whispered something in her ear, and suddenly both turned to face me, shoulder to shoulder, their look accusatory. Feebly I waved, though I don’t know why. I found him a slimy concoction of the male species, and she looked vacuous and flighty. A snap judgment, of course, but probably on the money. Both scurried across the avenue, against the light, and a taxi almost sideswiped them. The woman’s high shrill laughter and his throaty rumble of joy were drowned out by a bus that backfired as they passed.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann, prisoner number 17,390 in Cell 9—ten feet from the electric chair—was electrocuted on April 3, 1936, at 8:47 p.m. Despite the intervention of Governor Hoffman, despite delays and appeals, despite outcry from so many others, he was killed, protesting his innocence to the end. “Gott! Gott! Gott!” he’d cried when the last visitor left. He sobbed in his cell. Clarence Darrow telegraphed the governor: “No one should be executed on such flimsy evidence.” The London Star labeled it “vulgarity, publicity, insult, and irrelevance.” Eleanor Roosevelt said: “The entire trial left me with question in my mind,” though she didn’t declare Bruno innocent. Even the Times rued the trial—the failure “to present positive evidence.” The American Mercury called it “Tabloid justice.” And the Boston Herald lamented, “What a miserable mess New Jersey made of the Bruno Hauptmann case.”