Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  “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.”

  I groaned, and Lindbergh flashed me a sideways glance.

  Wilentz asked for more background, and Jafsie began a yawn-inducing tale of the story of his life; I was just dropping off to sleep, when Wilentz asked him how he and Colonel Lindbergh happened to meet a man at St. Raymond’s Cemetery on the night of April 2, 1932.

  “And didn’t you have with you,” Wilentz pressed on, “a box of money?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you give that money in a box to someone that night?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “Who did you give that money to?”

  “John.”

  Wilentz turned significantly to the jury. “And who is John?”

  Condon turned slightly in his chair to look toward the defendant. He pointed a finger like a gun at Hauptmann and said, so loud his voice rang in the room, “John is Bru-no…Rich-ard…Haupt-mann!”

  The court was up for grabs, the woman I took to be Mrs. Hauptmann looking at her husband with grave concern, Hauptmann himself looking stunned, defense counsel Fisher gripping Hauptmann’s shoulder supportively, the gallery gasping and then jabbering, chairs scooting as news messengers scurried out.

  I got up, too.

  Lindbergh touched my arm and said, “Nate? You all right?”

  “I’ve heard enough, Slim,” I said, not unkindly, and went out.

  That night, in the Union Hotel, I sat and drank and watched chief defense attorney Reilly laugh it up with reporters, a bosomy blonde “secretary” on either arm, drinking his red face redder. The next morning Breckinridge drove me back to Grand Central Station, where I caught the Limited. Breckinridge and I hadn’t spoken much on the ride. A little small talk; the weather had turned foggy and wet—we talked about that.

  At one point he did say, “Don’t judge Slim too harshly.”

  It was a reasonable request, and I nodded, but I remember wondering if anybody on earth, besides Hauptmann’s wife Anna, would grant the accused that same simple plea.

  Now, over a year later, riding the Limited east once again, snug in my upper berth, I wondered if maybe, finally, somebody had.

  28

  The Statehouse in Trenton, on this cold, rainy March morning (and on any other), was an ungainly affair squatting on a stretch of landscape between State Street and the Delaware River. The three-and-a-half-story wedding-cake structure seemed designed to confirm the rest of the nation’s suspicions that New Jersey was innately second-rate; entry was via a ponderous two-tier porch supported by midget granite columns.

  I stalked the main corridor, shaking rain off my hat, my trenchcoat leaving a damp trail. As I walked I glanced at the stern faded portraits of early New Jersey patriots and statesmen, and got dirty looks in return. I moved through the cramped rotunda, festively decorated by musty, faded regimental flags from the Civil War, and found my way to the upper two floors, a gloomy maze where bureaucrats wandered aimlessly.

  Somehow I managed to find the executive offices, where a male secretary took my coat and hat and showed me in to see Governor Hoffman.

  The governor was on the phone, but he smiled broadly and gestured me to an overstuffed chair opposite his massive mahogany desk, which was stacked with documents and manila folders. He was a stocky, cheerful-looking man of perhaps forty, with a round, handsome face; his blue suit and blue-and-gray tie looked crisp and neat, and so did he.

  Hoffman was the youngest governor in the states, and had been sworn into office the day the Hauptmann trial began; a career politician, he was a Republican who won in a year of Democratic landslide.

  “I’m glad you’ve arrived safely,” he was saying, not to me, smiling at the phone. “Come right over. Yes, he’s just arrived.”

  The office was a sumptuous, dark-wood chamber with an enormous Oriental carpet, and a fireplace in which flames were quietly licking logs. A big, warm room, slightly cooled by formal, forbidding oil portraits of unknown past Jersey dignitaries, it nonetheless had the unlived-in, transitory feeling of the elective official’s office. The huge, yellow globe near the desk seemed never to have been spun; the leather-bound books shelved behind the governor seemed never to have been cracked open; the flags—American at left, state a
t right—slumped on poles, never to be unfurled. The wooden filing cabinet, about ten feet away, seemed there only to provide a resting place for a silver loving cup of flowers.

  “That was an old friend of yours,” the governor said with a smile, as he hung up, offering no further explanation. He stood and extended his hand, and I stood and extended mine; our grips were suitably masculine and firm. We sat back down.

  “I’m delighted you’ve come, Mr. Heller,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You’re just the man for this job.”

  “What job is that, exactly?”

  He twitched a smile, eyes twinkling; there was an endearing pixielike quality about him, a streak of unexpected mischief.

  Then his expression turned solemn. “Mr. Heller, I’ve employed several other private detectives, and we’ve come up with a good deal of evidence…unfortunately, none of it compelling enough to get Richard Hauptmann a new trial. Nor am I in a position to grant him a pardon, or commute his sentence to a prison term.”

  “Oh?”

  He shook his head. “I’m only one member of the Court of Pardons. In New Jersey the governor has no authority to commute a capital sentence. And I can’t issue another reprieve unless you come up with something so startling that my Democratic Attorney General can’t ignore it.”

  “Wilentz, you mean.”

  “That’s right. We’re old school pals, Dave and me. You met him, didn’t you?”

  “Briefly. I saw him in action at the trial. I was only there one day, but it was an eyeful. Slick operator.”

  He nodded, reaching for a humidor on his desk. “He is, at that. Care for a cigar?”

  “No thanks.”

  He lit his up; a big fine fat Havana. “Funny thing is, Dave is anti-capital punishment. Me, I have no compunction about showing a murderer the door to hell.”

  Yes, I was back in the Lindbergh Case, aboard the Melodrama Express.

  “Why,” I asked, “does the State of New Jersey need private investigators?”

  “I’m surprised you’d ask that, Mr. Heller, considering that once upon a time you had considerable contact with our State Police, specifically Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.”

  I shrugged, nodded.

  He narrowed his eyes, staring at me forcefully. “You see, I went to the death house, Mr. Heller, to see Bruno Richard Hauptmann…I’d heard he wished an ‘audience’ with me, and, rather on the sly, I granted him one, thinking, I admit, that I might hear a confession. Instead, I heard a quietly indignant man, a man of considerable dignity and intelligence, who raised a good number of questions that I had to agree needed answering.”

  “Ah,” I said, smiling, suddenly making a connection. “So you went to the head of the State Police to find out the answers to those questions.”

  “Precisely. And our mutual friend Colonel Schwarzkopf ignored my executive order to reopen the investigation, sending me monthly, token notes to the effect that there were no new developments. When I granted Hauptmann the thirty-day reprieve, I began hiring my own investigators, and essentially ‘fired’ Schwarzkopf from the Lindbergh case. There is, as you might imagine, no love lost between us.”

  “Was Hauptmann himself the reason you got involved in this?” I asked, knowing the governor had been accused of playing politics. “Was he that convincing a jailhouse lawyer?”

  “He was convincing, all right. But there were other factors. I believe you’ve met New Jersey’s answer to Sherlock Holmes—Ellis Parker?”

  I nodded. “At Lindbergh’s estate, in the early days.”

  “Parker’s been conducting his own investigation,” Hoffman said, “although I haven’t been privy to any results as yet. He’s one of the people I want you to look up, in fact; he’s playing his cards a little too close to his vest, for my money.”

  “The old boy’s a showboat,” I said. “But don’t be fooled by the hick veneer.”

  “Oh, I’m not. And I take his opinion quite seriously. He thinks Hauptmann is innocent, or at least no more than a minor figure, who is taking the fall for the real kidnappers.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion group may never have had the child?”

  He nodded vigorously, exhaling smoke, gesturing with the cigar. “Yes, and consider this, Mr. Heller—Ellis Parker insists that the baby found in that shallow grave in the Sourlands woods was not Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

  “Well, I understand Slim Lindbergh’s identification of the body was pretty perfunctory.”

  “Perfunctory! Are you aware that the body was examined, in the morgue, by…let me find it.” He shuffled through some of the many documents and folders on his desk; quickly centered on the correct one and read, with rather a triumphant flourish, “The child’s own pediatrician, Dr. Phillip Van Ingen, examined the remains. The undertaker reported Dr. Van Ingen as saying, and this is a quote: ‘If you were to lay ten million dollars on a table and tell me it was mine, if I could say positively that this was the Colonel’s son, I couldn’t honestly identify this skeleton.’”

  “Skeleton? I knew the body was decayed, but I understood the facial features were intact….”

  “Haven’t you ever seen what the ‘body’ looked like?”

  I shook my head, no.

  He plucked a glossy photo from a folder. “They couldn’t even verify the sex,” he said, and handed the photo to me.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  It was just a tiny black pile of bones; you could make out a skull, more or less, and a rib or two; the left leg was missing.

  My mouth felt suddenly dry. “I heard that the child was identified by its toes overlapping in some distinctive way…”

  “Well, there’s only one foot there to check at all,” Hoffman said. “But Dr. Van Ingen’s examination of the child, on February eighteenth, ten days before the kidnapping, reported both its little toes were turned in, overlapping the next toe. The corpse, what there was of it, had overlapping toes as well—but it was the large toe, overlapping the second toe.”

  “It’s hard to tell even that,” 1 said, and handed the damn photo back to him.

  “One fact is indisputable—the physician at the mortuary measured the body and found it to be thirty-three and one-third inches long. Van Ingen’s measurement on February eighteenth was twenty-nine inches.”

  “Some of that could be attributed to growth of bones after death,” I said, thinking it through. “But hell—not four and a half inches…”

  “Of course this all points up one of the major blunders of the trial,” Hoffman said.

  I nodded. “You mean, Hauptmann’s defense counsel stipulating that the corpse found at Mt. Rose was Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

  It had gotten a lot of play in the press. Wilentz had been questioning the woman in charge of St. Michael’s Orphanage, located less than a mile from where the little corpse had been found; Wilentz wanted to dispute the notion that the body in the woods might have been one of the orphanage’s charges.

  But Reilly interrupted the proceedings almost immediately, saying, “We have never made any claim that this was other than Colonel Lindbergh’s child.”

  Even the prosecution was stunned by this preposterous bungle. There was no logical reason for Reilly to have handed Wilentz the corpus delicti on a silver platter like that. Reportedly, co-counsel Fisher—long Hauptmann’s most staunch supporter—had stood up, shouted to Reilly, “You’re conceding our client to the electric chair,” and bolted out.

  “Who the hell hired Reilly, anyway?” I asked.

  “Hearst.” The Governor said this with a quiet, ironic smile.

  “Hearst! Good God, the Hearst papers crucified Hauptmann! Hearst is an old Lindbergh crony, for Christ’s sake…”

  “Well,” Hoffman said, with a small shrug, playing devil’s advocate, “Reilly was, at one time, a top trial attorney. You know, he got a lot of the big prohibition gangsters off, in his day.”

  I sat up. “Oh, really. Like who?”

&n
bsp; Hoffman shrugged. “One of his more notorious clients, I suppose, was Frankie Yale.”

  Until his demise in 1927, Frankie Yale had been Al Capone’s man on the East Coat. Capone had, in ’27, bumped Yale and replaced him with one Paul Ricca.

  Could Reilly have been in Capone’s pocket? Had the red-nosed shyster thrown the case?

  “You know, Mr. Heller,” Hoffman said, “there are those in this state who believe I’ve gotten into this thing for my own glory, my own gain…considering the fact that I’m receiving death threats, that my home and my wife and three little girls are under twenty-four-hour guard accordingly, and that the press is demanding my impeachment, I doubt I’ve made a ‘good political move,’ in ‘siding with’ Hauptmann.”

  “What are you after, Governor?”

  His cheerful mask collapsed. “Look—all I’m after is the truth. The people of this state are entitled to it, and Hauptmann has a right to live if he didn’t murder the Lindbergh baby. This was a shocking crime—and, in the interest of society, it must be completely solved.”

  “You’ve let this thing get to you, Governor. You’ve let it touch you. That’s dangerous.”

  With a thumb over his shoulder, he gestured at the state flag. “Mr. Heller, as Governor of this state, I have a duty to perform.”

  “No politician ever got rich doing his duty.”

  He flinched at that; it was barely perceptible, but it was there. He said, “I haven’t expressed an opinion on the guilt or innocence of Hauptmann. But I share, with hundreds of thousands of people, doubts about the value of the evidence that placed him in the Lindbergh nursery the night of the crime.”

  “I’m not all that familiar with the evidence.”

  “Well, I’m going to make you familiar with it. But you are familiar with the role that passion and prejudice played in convicting a man that the newspapers had already convicted.” He patted the folders on his desk. “I doubt the truthfulness, and the competency, of some of the state’s chief witnesses. And I doubt that this crime could have been committed by any one man. Schwarzkopf and the rest, maybe even Charles Lindbergh himself, want this one man’s death so that the books can be closed, and the pretense can be made that another great crime has been successfully solved.”