Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  The sarcasm evaporated. “What choice have I? The state confiscated our funds, Annie and me. Are you a Jewish man, Nate?”

  “My father was. I’m not very religious.”

  “I am.” He smiled nervously. “Religious, I mean. Do you hate me for being German? Do you think I think I am the ‘master race’? Do you think I would hate a Jewish man?”

  Wilentz, maybe.

  “I’m an American,” I said, “whose forefathers came from Germany. Why should I hate you, or make such assumptions?”

  Rather shyly, he touched my shoulder. “Mr. Heller—why weren’t you on the jury?”

  “Dick,” I said, “you don’t have to convince me that a lot of the evidence was tampered with or invented. You don’t have to tell me that Hochmuth was blind, or that that movie cashier who said she remembered you was full of shit. I used to be a cop. I know all about that stuff.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Tell me about Isidor Fisch.” I smiled gently. “Your Jewish friend.”

  He laughed soundlessly. “The ‘Fisch story,’ they call it.”

  “Everybody did say it smelled.”

  “It sounds bad. But it’s true.”

  “Tell me. Take your time.”

  He drew in a breath, let it out slowly. “I meet Isidor Fisch at Hunter’s Island in Pelham Park. Annie and I and our friends go there many weekends in the winter and summer both. We have enjoyed a wonderful outdoor life there, boating, swimming, fishing…” A small private smile appeared, and a distant look came to his eyes. “…cooking over a fire, playing music and singing…Annie bought me field glasses. I loved to watch the birds.” That brought him back to reality. He got up from the cot and moved quickly to the bars and looked out.

  “It’s still caught,” he said, shaking his head. “They give up. Damn. A free thing like that should never be in there.”

  “Richard,” I said. “Dick. Tell me about Izzy Fisch.”

  He shuffled back over and sat on the cot. He said, “Fisch I meet three, four times at Hunter’s Island. Once he mentions that he is interested in the stock market, like me. But he tells me he is in the fur business, and that there is good money in it. He knows of what he is talking, was a furrier in the old country. I buy some stocks and bonds for him, he bought some furs for me…I start with five hundred dollars I give him to buy furs, and keep reinvesting, until I finally have seven thousand dollars in furs.”

  “Where were all these furs being stored?”

  “In the fur district in New York, Fisch said, but we never got around to going to where they were in a warehouse. Fisch was sickly, had a bad cough.”

  So did Jafsie’s Cemetery John, I recalled.

  “One day he said he was going to Germany to visit his parents. He asked me to keep four hundred sealskins at my home, while he was gone. Later on, he asks me when he goes to Germany if he can leave with me some of his belongings, and he brought to my house two satchels, a big one and a small one.”

  “What about the money?”

  Hauptmann motioned for me to be patient. “The Saturday before Isidor left for Germany, my wife and I give for him a farewell party. He brought along under his arm a cardboard box, wrapped up with string, and asks me to put it in a closet for him and keep it until he comes back. I thought maybe in the box were some things he forgot to put in the satchels, maybe papers and letters. I put the package for him on the upper shelf of the broom closet. It was too high there, for my wife to see, although they try to make her look bad at the trial, because they claim the shelf was low and she cleaned in there and she should see it. But she never did. Anyway. After a while there were rags and things on the shelf, covering up the box, and I forgot all about it. Fisch, he told me he would be back again in two months.”

  “But you never heard from him again.”

  “Oh, but I did. He wrote me a few times…and then, in March or April, from his brother Pincus I get a letter saying Isidor have died. Pincus asked me, in his letter, as he knew I was a friend of Isidor’s, to look after his brother’s financial business in this country. So I wrote and told Pincus how we stood in the stock and fur business.”

  From the expression on Hauptmann’s face, I could tell there had been discrepancies.

  “Fisch have told me that he got bank accounts and a safe-deposit box and that he also got ten thousand dollars in some company that bakes pies. Also lots of furs. And that a friend owed him two thousand dollars. But when I start to look around after Isidor have died, I find that the pie company is a fake and that Fisch owes the friend eight hundred dollars, and that another friend he owes four thousand dollars. I could find no furs, except the four hundred skins at my house, which are not worth half what he told me. So I am all mixed up.”

  “So you opened up that little box in your closet, and…”

  “No! I have forgot all about that box. I go to Fisch’s lawyer, who tells me there is no money, nothing valuable in the safe-deposit box. And I give up.”

  “You gave up?”

  “Yes. But three or four weeks before I get arrested, it has been raining, like tonight…and the water comes in the broom closet and as I am cleaning it up, I run across the box, soaking wet. When I look, I find it is full of money! Oh ho, I say to myself—this is where Izzy’s money has gone. What he has saved up, he has put in gold certificates. I put the money in a pail, and took it to my garage, where I dried it and hid it like the police found it, except for the few bills I have already spent. I did not put it in the bank, because with gold certificates, I think I should have trouble.”

  “You helped yourself, because Izzy was into you for, what? Seven grand?”

  He nodded. “Because he owed me money and have tried to cheat me, I see that money and feel it is largely mine.” He shook his head, sighing heavily. “Could I have known that money was Lindbergh baby money? No! The gas station man have testify that I say to him when I gave him that bill, ‘I have a hundred more like that at home.’ Would I say that if I knew that these bills maybe could take my life some day?”

  “But you lied to the cops about the money.”

  “Because I have gold certificates, and it is illegal! I knew I would get in much trouble if they knew I had so much gold money, and besides, near the money in my garage I have hidden also a pistol which I know I am not supposed to have.”

  “Do you think Isidor Fisch was involved in the kidnapping, or anyway, in the extortion?”

  He shook his head slowly, hopelessly. “I don’t know, Nate. I wish I did. I know, when I ask around about him, I find he was not the man I thought. He was a crook. Maybe he was trading in what they call ‘hot money.’”

  There were footsteps in the corridor.

  “Pincus, Izzy’s brother, wrote me to say that shortly before Isidor died, from his bed of death, he called out for me—he seemed to want to say something about me. But he was too weak. He took to his grave that which would be of great help to me now.”

  Warden Kimberling’s stocky figure—now in a gray business suit, the black slicker gone—appeared beyond the iron bars. “Mr. Heller, just a few more minutes.”

  “Would you mind checking on my secretary, Warden? See how she’s doing?”

  He nodded.

  As he moved through the door, I saw that whenever that door opened, Hauptmann got a nice clear view of the electric chair, covered in white.

  “Six men have walked by me, going to that room, since I come here,” he said with no apparent emotion. “Some of them silent, some of them crying, some even scream.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  The door closed, the warden presumably having a little chat with Evalyn.

  Hauptmann’s hand settled on my shoulder again, less tentatively now. “Nate, I am glad you’re not the pal of Jafsie.”

  I laughed. “That old bastard drives me bughouse.”

  “He came to see me, you know.”

  That threw me. “Here?”

  “No. At the
cell in Hunterdon County jail. He ask me if I have athletic training. I tell him yes. He ask me if I have won any prizes, and I tell him sixteen or seventeen in Germany for running. Then it look like he was going to cry.”

  “He didn’t claim to recognize you?”

  “He call me ‘John’ many times, though I correct him. He say if I know anything, I should confess, because there was no connection between the money and the kidnapping, and I would clear myself and himself. He say the police were treating him roughly. But he never said I am the fellow—and when he left, he ask could he come see me again, and I say ‘yes.’ But he never did.”

  The door to the death chamber opened and gave us another glimpse of the muslin-covered chair as Warden Kimberling approached, saying, “It’s time, Mr. Heller.”

  I stood. Hauptmann and I again shook hands. His eyes, which had been so cold, were warm. His smile was warm.

  “I think you might help me,” he said.

  “I’m going to try,” I admitted.

  “You should believe in God, Nate. I know He will never permit some persons to commit a murder on me.”

  “Murders do happen, Dick.”

  He laughed, and some bitterness crept back in. “Yes—the poor child have been kidnapped and murdered, so somebody must die for it. For is the parent not the great flier? And if somebody does not die for the death of the child, then always the police will be monkeys.” He shrugged, his smile was a humorless, fatalistic smirk. “So I am the one who is picked out to die.”

  There was nothing to say to that. I gave him a tight smile, a little pat on the shoulder, and got the hell out, the door clanking shut behind me.

  Evalyn, sitting on the bench, all in black, truly seemed in mourning now; she’d been taking notes, my rich little secretary, the pencil worn to a nub, her face tear-streaked.

  She stood, wobblingly, and came into my arms. “That poor man,” she said. “That poor man.”

  The warden was looking on from the doorway, uncomfortably.

  “Let’s get our coats,” I told her.

  From the cellblock, I heard someone say, “Damn.”

  I let go of Evalyn and moved toward the warden and stood in the doorway and looked out at Hauptmann, one last time, a white face behind gray bars.

  “At least he suffer not long,” he said, looking up.

  I stepped out into the corridor and glanced up; and saw the small gray form of the bird motionless against the wire.

  30

  This neighborhood, at the far edge of the Bronx, had the small-town flavor of many a big city’s outlying sections. Most of the houses were two-family, two-story wood-and-stucco jobs with neat little lawns, often with a weed-patched vacant lot next door. Hauptmann’s residence—at 1279 East 222nd—was no exception: a two-and-a-half-story frame structure, its second story recessed, a stone wall bordering the front as steps rose gently to a winter-brown lawn dominated by bushes, a vine crawling up the tan stucco in front, toward the second-floor windows, like a cat burglar. At the right of the house was a vacant lot thicketed with weeds, halted at the far right by a rutted country lane, and just across that lane was what remained of the wreckage of the garage Hauptmann had built there. Behind the house, cutting off the lane, were woods, close enough to the house to provide shade, when the leaves returned, anyway.

  I parked the Packard in front; Evalyn was with me. She wore a black-and-gray three-piece suit, one piece of which was her topcoat, and a black-and-gray beret. She wore only a few touches of jewelry, at my request—demand, actually, if she were to insist on playing “Thin Man” with me. At least she didn’t bring her goddamn dog.

  We had stayed, the night before, in separate suites at the Hotel Sterling, where Hoffman had made reservations for us in the section of the hotel known as the Government House; it had once been the governor’s mansion, so it was fitting in a way. Fancier digs than necessary, but I wasn’t paying.

  We had talked into the night, over cocktails in her suite, the death-row confab with Hauptmann weighing heavily on both our minds. If anything romantic or sexual was going to reblossom between us, this was not the time or place or mood. I was curious, however, why Evalyn was still, after four long years, digging into this horrendous fucking case. Hadn’t she been burned badly enough by Gaston Means?

  “Nate,” she said, “I’m sorry I failed to get that child back. I’m sorry I was tricked, I’m sorry I was swindled. But I’ll always be glad, in my heart, that there was something that compelled me to try.”

  “Fine,” I said, just a little drunk. “Swell. But that wasn’t my question. Why are you still involved?”

  She shrugged, and began to ramble in what seemed at first a nonresponsive way. “You know, I had to close down 2020 Massachusetts Avenue—I just couldn’t afford such a big place. And for a time I was in an apartment. Can you picture me in an apartment, Nate? Anyway, a while ago, Ned—my husband, remember him?—as our courtroom battles over custody of the children were continuing, took a bad turn. In terms of his health.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry.”

  “In terms of his mental health, actually. I’ll never divorce Ned—I won’t have to. There will be no more struggles over custody—the children are damn near grown, and, well…at intervals I get reports from a Maryland hospital concerning a patient there, who has morbid preoccupations and lives in a state of mental exile. Shut off even from himself. If he is addressed by his right name, he grows excited—and swears he is not a McLean.”

  “I’m sorry, Evalyn.”

  She smiled it off gaily and it was about as convincing as wax fruit. “At any rate, the court awarded me Friendship, the McLean estate, and that was where I was living when the Hauptmann trial was held. I witnessed it from a distance, with some skepticism, as anyone familiar with the facts of the case well might, and afterward, to fill my rich, idle time, I procured the many-volumed transcript of that trial. If it could be called a trial. To me, it was a disgusting hippodrome.”

  “And you got interested again.”

  “I was always interested,” she said, with a little laugh. “I think I paid for the right to remain interested, don’t you? And I think I have the right to be concerned when someone else is being wronged in this convoluted affair. And the way Mr. Hauptmann is being wronged makes the injustice done me pale in comparison.”

  “Your concern for Hauptmann is admirable,” I granted her. “But the possibility remains that he was, in some way or manner, involved in at least the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion caper. He was convincing tonight, but many a guilty man is, where his innocence is concerned.”

  “I’m concerned about more than just Hauptmann’s innocence,” she said. Her eyes glittered over her cocktail glass. “I have my doubts about that little skeleton they found in the woods.”

  “Well,” I admitted, “after that photo Hoffman showed me, I can see why.”

  “Nate, thousands upon thousands of people had combed those woods near the very spot the little body was found. Hell, even the brush underneath the body was trampled.”

  “Underneath?”

  “Only a few feet away, telephone workmen had put up a pole, laying wires, because of the need for extra communcations in those frenzied early days.” Her archness was offset by her sincerity. “Those tiny bones, who’s-ever they were, must have been placed there, long after the fact.”

  “Slim’s identification of the body was pretty hasty,” I allowed.

  She studied her drink, then made a confession: “Well, there was one other person who made an identification.”

  That was the first I’d heard of that. “Who in hell?”

  “Betty Gow,” she said. “The nurse. She viewed the little body, too, and identified it as Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

  “Based on what? There was nothing to identify. I saw the photo…”

  “There was a tiny garment under the bones. Betty Gow claimed to recognize it as a little shirt made by her, the night of the kidnapping, to wrap the child in because he had a col
d. She claimed she knew it from the thread, the distinctive blue thread she’d used.”

  “I see. Still sounds a little thin. But that is the most convincing case for those bones being the real child.”

  “Yes—but couldn’t that garment have been planted, as well?”

  “I suppose…now we’re getting a little overmelodramatic, aren’t we, Evalyn?”

  “Are we? Haven’t you always thought someone on the ‘inside,’ with either the Lindbergh or Morrow family staff, was somehow in on the crime?”

  “Yes. So, what? You’re saying Betty Gow might have lied, or helped plant that little shirt…”

  “Not necessarily. The cloth and the thread were provided to Betty Gow, the night of the kidnapping, by the butler’s wife—Elsie Whately.”

  The Hauptmann apartment took up the second floor of the house, a mostly empty five rooms for which Evalyn had been paying, since December, fifty dollars a month to the seventy-year-old widow who lived below.

  As I wandered the empty rooms I remembered reading of the new, rather expensive furniture the Hauptmanns owned, which had seemed so suspicious to the cops and prosecutors. A walnut bedroom suite, an ivory crib, a floor-model radio in a nice walnut veneer cabinet—all gone, sold to help pay for the defense effort. Now there was nothing in this apartment but the bare floors, faded wallpaper and our echoing footsteps.

  “As many people as have been through here,” I said, “I don’t know what I expected to find.”

  Evalyn had been following me like a dutiful puppy through the small living room, the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the bath. “It doesn’t seem to me,” she said, “that the Hauptmanns were living in the lap of luxury.”

  “It doesn’t even seem that way to me,” I said, “although this is about right for a man operating a little contracting business…dabbling in the stock market in a minor, amateur way…his wife working full-time as a waitress in a bakery. About right. Let’s look in those famous closets, shall we?”