Stolen Away (32 page)

Wilentz was smooth as a polished stone, but Reilly—who was trying to make the New Jersey police look like buffoons, which shouldn’t have been that tough—was a ham actor, bouncing his voice off the rafters.

The red-flannel-faced defender did score a few points: he got a fingerprint man to admit never having even heard of the Bertillon system, and got across the ludicrously shoddy police work of the initial investigation by getting two cops to say each thought the
other
was going to take a plaster cast of the footprint beneath the child’s window.

Then Wilentz got away from the police witnesses and put a frail, bearded, eighty-seven-year-old codger named Amandus Hochmuth on the stand. Hochmuth, who lived on the corner of Mercer County Highway and Featherbed Lane, claimed he’d seen Hauptmann driving a “dirty green” car on the morning of March 1, 1932. He remembered this because Hauptmann had “glared” at him.

“And the man you saw looking out of that automobile, glaring at you,” Wilentz said, “is he in this room?”

“Yes!”

“Where is he?”

“Alongside that trooper there,” Hochmuth said, and as he pointed a wavering finger at Hauptmann, the courtroom lights went out.

“It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness!” Reilly shouted in the near-darkness.

The courtroom exploded in laughter. Slim didn’t smile next to me, and I didn’t either, because Reilly’s style bored me; and Judge Trenchard rapped his gavel and threatened the gallery again.

The lights came up within a couple minutes, and Wilentz directed Hochmuth to step down and identify the man he’d seen, and, slow, wobbly, the witness did so, pointing a trembling finger at Hauptmann, and then actually placing a hand on Hauptmann’s knee, fearfully, as if he might get burned.

The defendant shook his head three times and with a bitter smile said to the woman behind him (his wife Anna, I wondered?): “
Der Alte ist verruckt.”

Next to me, Slim said softly, “What was that?”

I whispered back: “He said, ‘The old man is crazy.’”

Then florid defender Reilly had a crack at the old man, and did get him to confess his eyes weren’t perfect, but otherwise couldn’t budge the old boy.

Next came several witnesses, including a Forest Service technologist, who Wilentz attempted to use to introduce evidence about the kidnap ladder. But Reilly and his associate Pope managed to block it; the ladder had been “altered” and passed between various “hands of people not identified by the prosecution.”

Following this came a familiar face, though I confess I didn’t recognize him at first. The ferret-faced cab driver, Perrone, who had delivered the envelope to Jafsie’s house the night of the first cemetery rendezvous, made an eyewitness ID of Hauptmann as the man who gave him the envelope. He got off the stand and placed a hand on Hauptmann’s shoulder and said, “This is the man.”

Hauptmann curled a lip and said, “You’re a liar.”

Reilly went after Perrone with a sledgehammer. He bullied the cab driver about being on relief; tested his memory about other passengers he’d had the same night; implied he’d been bought and coached by the prosecution. The tactic backfired: the courtroom hated Reilly by the time the badgering was over.

Then it was my turn. I was questioned by Wilentz about driving Condon to Woodlawn Cemetery for the first of the two “Cemetery John” encounters. I told of what I’d seen, which included the guy jumping off the cemetery gate and running into Van Cortlandt Park, Condon following him to a bench by the shack where they sat and talked. Told all of it.

Almost all of it. There was one question, a rather key question, I wasn’t asked by the slick Wilentz.

“Buy you lunch, Nate?” Slim asked, and I said sure, as we exited the courtroom for the noon break; we both had to damn near shout, because the courtroom was still buzzing.

“Union Hotel dining room okay?” Lindy asked, breath smoking in the chill air, as we pushed through a crowd that was cheering and clapping at the sight of the Lone Eagle; newsreel cameras churned and reporters called out questions—none of it registering on Slim, who carried around with him his own quiet at the center of the storm.

“Hotel dining room’s swell,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Right there,” he said, nodding across the way. “That’s where you’re staying.”

We moved through the car-choked street; onlookers called out to Lindy who at times bestowed them a tight glazed smile, and very occasionally a nod. He seemed oblivious to the grisly goods being hawked, the little ladders and such; but he couldn’t have been.

The Union Hotel was a lumbering red-brick affair with ugly gingerbread work detailing a sprawling porch over which lurked double-deck balconies. Out front a chalk sandwich board listed the fare in the dining room: Lamp Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, Lindbergh Sundaes, among others.

The dining room was bustling, but a few tables were reserved for celebrities like Slim and the prosecution and defense teams. Colonel Breckinridge, who hadn’t made it into the courtroom, was waiting for us at an isolated table off to one side.

As we sat down, Breckinridge asked Lindbergh how the trial was going today, and he said, “Fine.”

I said, “Reilly strikes me as the prosecution’s biggest asset.”

“How so?” Breckinridge asked.

“Well, that swallowtail coat and spats getup isn’t exactly endearing him to that down-home jury. Or his loud, bullying style. He’s about as subtle as John Barrymore half-in-the-bag.”

A waiter handed us menus and Lindbergh examined his with unblinking eyes, his expression not unlike the one the defendant had been wearing in court.

The middle-aged, potbellied waiter, though busy, stood attentively by while we read the menu and ordered at leisure; Lindbergh wasn’t just any customer, after all.

“What are the ‘Hauptmann Fries’?” I asked him.

“German fried potatoes,” he said blandly.

Lindbergh ordered vegetable soup and a hard roll; Breckinridge had the Lamb Chops Jafsie; and I had the Gow Goulash (named for Betty, the nurse, who’d come from Scotland to testify a few days before).

While we waited for our lunches, I said, “I notice Wilentz didn’t ask me about that suspicious guy I saw walk by Jafsie and me, at the cemetery.”

“Oh?” Breckinridge said.

Lindy said nothing.

“Must not fit his no-conspiracy thesis,” I said. “Slim, did he ask you about the guy
you
saw?”

“What guy?” Slim asked.

“The guy you saw on
your
cemetery jaunt. Could’ve been the same guy I saw on mine.”

Lindbergh shrugged.

“Come on, Slim—it probably
was
the guy I saw. Walked by with a stoop, covering his face with a hanky, swarthy fella?”

“Just some bystander,” he said.

“Oh, it’s just a coincidence, we both saw, on our two separate trips, at our two separate cemeteries, a stooped-over wop covering his face with a hanky, while he walked by checking us out? Slim. Please.”

Lindbergh said, rather tightly, “Let Wilentz do his job.”

I sat forward; silverware clinked. “Why didn’t Wilentz ask me anything about my
real
role in the case? There was nothing about Capone, or Marinelli and Sivella mentioning the name ‘Jafsie’
before
Condon was on the scene, or Curtis or Means or…”

“That is not,” he said crisply, “the focus of this trial. Let it go.”

“Let it go? Maybe
Reilly
won’t let it go, Slim.”

His mouth twitched irritably. “Just use common sense on the stand, Nate. All right?”

“Common sense?”

Our food arrived; I waited till everybody was served and the waiter was gone. The Gow Goulash looked tomatoey and was steaming hot and smelled good.

“Common sense,” I repeated. “You mean, lie on the stand?”

Lindbergh glared at me, but said nothing.

Breckinridge said, “No one is suggesting that, Heller, certainly.”

I took a bite of the goulash; it tasted as good as it looked. Damn near as good as Betty Gow looked, for that matter.

“You know, gents,” I said reflectively, “I’m from Chicago, and in many respects I’m your typical low-life greedy Chicago cop. Of course I’m private now, and part of why I left the department is that some people assumed I was for sale at any price. I’m not.”

“No one is suggesting…” Breckinridge began, nervously.

“There’s a lot of things I’ll do for money, or even just the hell of it. But I make it a point not to lie on witness stands.”

Lindbergh was looking at his soup as he spooned it; eating quickly, for him.

“You remember that gun I loaned you, Slim? The one you took to the cemetery that night?”

He nodded, but he didn’t look at me.

“I lied on the witness stand, once. The cops and the mob had a patsy picked out. It was even okay with the patsy—he was in on the fix. I didn’t see the harm of going along with it. So I lied on the witness stand.”

Lindbergh touched his lips with a napkin.

“It got me ahead,” I said, shrugging. “It’s how I got to be the youngest plainclothes officer on the goddamn Chicago police. But it rubbed my father the wrong way. Old union guy that he was. Stuffy about things like that, like telling the truth under oath. Funny—he didn’t even believe in God, yet if they put him under oath, he couldn’t have told anything but the truth. Anyway. That gun I loaned you, he killed himself with it. My gun. Since then, I’ve been fussy about what I say on witness stands.”

Slim said, “I’m sorry about your father.”

“That wasn’t my point.”

“I know what your point is. I don’t appreciate being called a liar.”

“Is that what I did?”

He looked at me hard; sighed. “Nate, this man is guilty.”

“I heard you say you couldn’t identify ‘Cemetery John’ by his voice. You told the same thing to a Bronx grand jury, not so long ago. What changed?”

He gestured with a pointing finger. “I have been assured by the top police officials in this case that there is
no
doubt about Hauptmann’s guilt. I have heard this from Schwarzkopf, from Frank J. Wilson, from Lt. Finn, from…” He shook his head, as if clearing cobwebs. “If you were able to sit in that courtroom every day, as I have, and as I
will
, you’d find that out.”

“Slim, I was a cop. I am a cop. And I can tell you one thing about cops: once a cop decides a guy is guilty, that guy is guilty. And a cop will, at that juncture, get real inventive. More tampered-with and manufactured evidence, and coached and purchased witness testimony, has been presented in American courtrooms than any other kind. Trust me.”

“I wish
you
would, Nate.”

“What?”

“Trust me.”

“Well.” I smiled; dabbed my own face with a napkin. “I will let you buy me lunch. I’m not that proud.”

We smiled at each other, warily, Slim and I, but Breckinridge was disturbed by all this.

After lunch I was called back on the stand and Reilly had at me. I thought, for a moment, he was getting to the heart of it.

He was asking me, in his high-handed ham-actor fashion, about the night we prepared the replica ballot box of ransom money for Jafsie and Slim to deliver to Cemetery John.

“Didn’t you think it would be a good idea to go along and
capture
that person?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did the Police Department of the city of New York, and the Department of Justice,
know
there was going to be a ransom payment that night?”

“I believe so. At least, the Treasury Department did.”

“Did they know
where
the payment would be made?”

“No. Nobody knew that. Colonel Lindbergh and Professor Condon didn’t know, until they got to the florist’s shop, as the note directed them.”

“You’re referring to the note delivered by the taxicab driver?”

“Yes.”

“Were the police notified, at that time? That the note had arrived, and that Dr. Condon and Colonel Lindbergh were off to make their payment?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Mr. Heller, weren’t you at the time a police officer yourself?”

“Yes. But with the Chicago Police. Just a liaison, an adviser, on this case.”

“And you don’t know why the New York Police, or the Justice or Treasury Departments, were not notified that the ransom payment was about to be made?”

“No, sir, I don’t. I wasn’t one of the big chiefs in this. I was just a dot on the ‘i.’”

That got a laugh; both Lindbergh and Hauptmann smiled, strangely enough, though Judge Trenchard didn’t. He rapped his gavel, demanded order, threatening to clear the courtroom.

“Mr. Heller,” Reilly said, a hand on his ample side, “as a police officer, did you make any effort to follow and protect Dr. Condon and the Colonel, that night?”

“No.”

Reilly smiled and looked tellingly at the jury. He’d made a point, however vaguely; but then he dismissed me!

I shuffled off to my chair, next to Lindbergh, who patted my arm supportively. My head was reeling. Shit, Reilly didn’t ask me about the stooped swarthy hanky-over-the-face guy I saw; or the Capone connection; or the spiritualists; or Means or Curtis or fucking
anything.
Some of it he may just not have known. But a good deal of it had gotten into police reports and the press, in the aftermath of the ransom scam and the Means and Curtis hoaxes.

The next witness was called: “Dr. John F. Condon.”

The great man had apparently just arrived, as he made a grand entrance from the back of the room.

Old Jafsie walked slowly, solemnly, to the witness chair, a tall, paunchy figure in circuit-preacher black with a crisp white hanky in a breast pocket and an old-fashioned gold watch chain draped across his breast.

Wilentz asked the witness for his age and place of residence, and Jafsie answered in a tremulous, yet booming voice, “I am seventy-four years of age, and a resident of the most beautiful borough in the world, the Bronx.”