Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

In what had been the nursery, I found the closet where the wainscoting had been removed to show the jury the “evidence” of Jafsie’s phone number having been written there. Last night I’d told Evalyn what I had heard about the reporter on the Daily News named Tim O’Neil who’d reputedly created this evidence for a headline. She’d been suitably outraged, and wondered if we shouldn’t “look this fellow up.” I said we should.

  In the ceiling of what had apparently been a linen closet, off the hall, was the access panel to the attic.

  “I’d better make this trip by myself,” I advised Evalyn, who had one look inside and agreed. I handed her my suit coat.

  To get to the attic hatch, I had to take the shelves down, stack them out in the hall, and scale the shelving cleats like some half-ass mountain-climber.

  “Careful!” she said.

  “Hauptmann must’ve needed that one scrap of lumber pretty goddamn bad,” I said, breathing hard, plastered to the closet wall like a bug, “to go looking for it up here.”

  Balancing awkwardly, clutching a cleat with one hand, I pushed the trapdoor-like panel up with the other, then hoisted myself up through the tiny opening—perhaps fifteen inches square. The attic was a dark, musty, dusty inverted V that would make a midget claustrophobic.

  I hung my head down the hatch where an eager-eyed Evalyn looked up from the linen closet. “See if the landlady has a flashlight,” I said.

  “There’s one in the car.”

  “Get it.”

  I waited, still hanging over the open space—the air was better there—and thought about pudgy Governor Hoffman having to squeeze up through this space, which he had on at least one occasion. That was worth a smile.

  Soon she handed me up the flashlight, standing on her toes to do it, and I got a better look at what turned out to be an unfinished attic. The flooring only went down the middle, with the joists, laths and plaster below bared at either side where the roof sloped low.

  With the beam of the flashlight, it didn’t take long to spot the one floorboard that was half the length of the others—the one from which Hauptmann had supposedly sawed the wood for a rail of the kidnap ladder. It was also easy to spot what made that evidence smell: from the apex of the roof, there were thirteen boards on one side, fourteen on the other.

  The fourteenth was the odd board out, and not just because it was the half-board: without it, the attic would have been symmetrical, a better, more likely carpenter job. The other boards had seven nails fastening them to the joists; the half-board, twenty-five.

  I handed Evalyn down the flash, then lowered myself and dropped, shaking the floor as I landed. I told Evalyn what I’d seen.

  “I understand there were something like thirty-five cops up there,” she said, with a disgusted smirk, “before anybody ‘noticed’ that extra, sawed-in-half floorboard.”

  “One more closet to check,” I said, getting back into my suit coat. “I want to see the most famous Hauptmann closet of all: where Fisch’s shoebox was stowed.”

  In the kitchen, the closet’s single shelf didn’t seem terribly high; this had been a broom closet—the hook where Mrs. Hauptmann had hung her apron was still there. Evalyn, short as she was, could almost reach the shelf, where the Fisch box had been kept, supposedly out of view from Anna Hauptmann.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, looking at this low-flying shelf. “Wilentz made Hauptmann’s wife look sick on the stand, because she admitted she kept a Prince Albert tobacco can on the edge of that shelf…she kept soap coupons and such in there, and she talked about being barely able to reach it.”

  “Then Wilentz showed photos and introduced data proving the shelf was lower than Anna claimed,” Evalyn said.

  It had been a bad moment for Mrs. Hauptmann.

  “Why would she lie about something so easily proven? Let’s have a closer look…”

  I removed the single shelf. Then I shined the flashlight on the wall.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “This closet’s been painted recently.”

  “Oh?”

  “I don’t think the others have.” We went back for a second look; and, no, the other closets had well-aged paint jobs, even to the point of chipping and peeling.

  I went back to the kitchen closet and ran my hand over that wall like a blind man reading a book in Braille.

  “Jesus!” I said. “Give me that flashlight again!”

  She did.

  “This closet has been painted recently—but up here…” And I cast the flashlight beam up six inches above the shelf cleats. “…there’s an area where the paint indents.”

  “Indents?”

  “Yeah. There are layers and layers of paint on these walls, paint on paint on paint. Over the years, when this closet has been repainted, nobody bothered to take the shelf out. Just painted walls and shelf alike.”

  “Yes. But…what…?”

  “Well, up here,” I said, reaching, running my finger from left to right along the wall the width of the shelf, “the paint is only a coat or two deep. Let me show you.”

  I lifted her by her tiny waist so she could run her fingertips along there herself. “You’re right! Nathan, you’re right…”

  I set her down. “Get your criminologist back in here,” I said. “With the right chemicals, he can prove that shelf was moved. I think he can find where those cleats were originally attached, too, and filled in the meantime with putty, and painted over. Originally, that shelf was right where Anna Hauptmann said it was.”

  “Then she really couldn’t have seen the shoebox!”

  “No she couldn’t. The cops lowered the shelves, to make her look like a liar.”

  Evalyn’s look of joy dissolved into a scowl. “Those bastards. Those bastards!”

  I shrugged. “Police work,” I said.

  From the other room, a male voice called, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”

  “In here,” Evalyn called,

  “You expecting somebody?” I asked.

  She nodded. She had a coy, little smile; cat that ate the canary.

  A tall, skinny bespectacled guy about thirty with pleasant, angular features, wearing a lumpy fedora and a rumpled raincoat under which a blue bow tie peeked, came strolling in. He was blond with a wispy mustache and a smirk.

  “You’re Mrs. McLean?” he said, grinning, taking off the hat.

  “That’s right,” she said, extending a gloved hand. “Thank you for coming, Mr. O’Neil.”

  “O’Neil?” I said.

  She nodded, smiling at me. “I took the liberty of asking Mr. O’Neil to stop by. Called him this morning from the hotel. I told him we had an exclusive for him on the Hauptmann case.”

  “You’re Tim O’Neil, with the Daily News?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said, and he extended his hand.

  I decked him.

  He sat on the kitchen floor, rubbing his jaw, arms and legs pointing every which way, eyes as confused as a drowning kitten’s. “What the hell was that for?”

  I leaned over him; both my hands were fists. “That was for faking that fucking phone number. In the closet in the other room?”

  His face went slack, his eyes filled with fear and something else. What? Remorse?

  “Oh Christ,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “The guy who’s going to beat the ever-loving crap out of you, if you don’t ’fess up.”

  On his ass, he scuttled back into a corner between kitchen cabinets and stove, like the world’s tallest, skinniest rat. “Listen…I don’t want any trouble…this isn’t gonna pay off for anybody…”

  I went over and grabbed him by his raincoat and hauled him off the floor and started slapping him around; his glasses flew off. Evalyn was watching, doing a nervous little jump every time I slapped him. But she liked it.

  “Stop!” he said. “Stop!”

  I stopped. I was starting to get embarrassed. The guy wasn’t fighting back at all.

  “Stop,” he said.

  He was crying.
<
br />   “Jesus,” I said, softly. I let go of him.

  He sat on the floor and cried.

  “I didn’t hit him that hard,” I said to Evalyn.

  She also seemed embarrassed. “I don’t think you did…I think it’s something else.”

  I got down on my haunches and said, “You want to talk, Tim?”

  Now all three of us were embarrassed.

  “Fuck,” he said, wiping tears and snot off his face with big flat hands. Then said to Evalyn, “Excuse the language, ma’am.”

  I gave him my handkerchief. He wiped off his face, blew his nose. Awkwardly, he started to hand the hanky back to me.

  “It’s yours now,” I said, and helped him to his feet. Evalyn handed him his glasses; they hadn’t broken.

  “You…you’re right,” he said, slipping on the specs. “You didn’t hit me that hard. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “My name is Heller. I’m a detective from Chicago.”

  “What are the Chicago cops doing in this, at this late date?”

  “I’m private. Working for Governor Hoffman, and Mrs. McLean, here. You did write Jafsie’s number on the wainscoting, didn’t you?”

  He nodded. Sighed heavily. “I got myself a real nice front-page scoop out of it. Got myself a big fat byline. But I never dreamed it would be one of the key goddamn pieces of evidence they used to nail that poor son of a bitch.”

  “I never met a reporter with a conscience before.”

  “I never knew I had a conscience, till you started slapping me around.”

  “So it bothers you.”

  “More than I even knew, apparently. I’m sorry. Blubbering like a baby like that…it’s really humiliating…”

  “Will you come forward?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No!” Evalyn said, dumbfounded. The blood, and the sympathy, drained out of her face. She clutched my arm. “Give him the Chicago lie-detector test, Nate!”

  “Huh?” O’Neil said. His eyes were large and scared.

  “Easy, Evalyn,” I said. “I’m not so young and reckless, anymore.”

  Besides, my gun was in my suitcase.

  I put a firm hand on O’Neil’s shoulder; he was taller than me, by perhaps three inches, but I outweighed him twenty-five pounds. “You want to run that by me again?”

  “I’m not coming forward. I can’t.” He held out his open palms like a beggar. “Precisely ’cause it did get into the trial, as evidence. I might go to jail. I could lose my job. I would be in very deep shit.”

  “You are in very deep shit,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “You can beat on me…incidentally, I’m prepared to fight you back, now…but it’s not going to change things. You’ll be the one in jail, for assault. And I’d sue Mrs. McLean out of some of that money she obviously has to burn.”

  He was right. There really wasn’t much I could do.

  “But if you’re investigating Bruno’s case,” he said, “trying to cheat the executioner out of his fun, at the last minute…I can be of help.”

  “Oh?”

  He nodded vigorously. His face was haggard, dark circles under the eyes. “Check the record. I’ve dug up any number of stories, since the Jafsie phone-number scam, bolstering Hauptmann’s position.”

  “You mean you’ve been working to clear him?”

  “Not exactly. I’m a reporter, and I do my job…but I’m working that angle, yeah.” He pointed a thumb at his chest. “I’m the guy who tracked down the employment agency records that showed Hauptmann was at work at the Majestic Apartments on March first, 1932, just like he said he was…when the cops conveniently lost the time sheets for that week.”

  “You are trying to balance the books, aren’t you, Tim? What can you give me?”

  “How about the real lowdown on Izzy Fisch?” he asked, with a wicked little smile, like a jeweler about to show Evalyn a really big rock.

  She and I exchanged significant glances.

  “What have you got, Tim?” I asked.

  “Plenty. See, I’ve got a big story on Fisch in the works. Real in-depth. But none of what I’ve got is public knowledge yet—for example, I know that the cops have ledger books and letters they confiscated from this apartment, that tend to back up the so-called Fisch story—none of which was used at the trial. I know lab tests back up Hauptmann’s claim that the money he had was water-soaked. And I know that Fisch was a confidence man who borrowed money from friends to invest in nonexistent businesses. I can tell you, based upon dozens of instances I’ve tracked, that Isidor Fisch never once repaid a loan.”

  “So he was a small-time con artist. But was he a large-scale crook?”

  O’Neil shook his head, made a clicking sound in his cheek. “That I don’t know. Could he have been in on the kidnapping? Sure. Masterminded it? I dunno. I know this: the rooming house he lived in was right smack in the middle of the Italian mob’s stomping grounds.”

  “Luciano territory?”

  “And how.” He seemed amused as he asked: “Does a Chicago boy like you know what Luciano’s best-paying racket is, since Repeal?”

  I nodded. “Dope.”

  “Give the man a cigar. And here Izzy Fisch is, importing furs and making trips to Europe. Think he might have been importing more than just sealskins? And I was able to connect Fisch to at least one Luciano hoodlum, a guy named Charley DeGrasie, who’s dead now, unfortunately. That was when the story started getting a little warm, and I backed off.”

  I was taking notes, by this time. “Is that all you have on Fisch, then?”

  “Not hardly. I talked to a guy named Arthur Trost. He’s a paint contractor. He said he knew Fisch since the summer of ’31, that he used to run into Fisch at a billiard parlor in Yorkville—German section of Manhattan. Around the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Fisch stopped frequenting the place.”

  “So?”

  “So in the summer of ’32, a painter pal of Trost’s asks him if he wanted to buy some hot money for fifty cents on the dollar from a friend of his. Trost told the guy he’d have to meet the person doing the selling, and got escorted to that very same billiard parlor, where who should be waiting but Isidor Fisch. Trost told his pal that he already knew Fisch and that Fisch already owed him money and that he wouldn’t believe Fisch if he was calling for help from the window of a burning building.”

  “So Trost never actually saw this ‘hot money.’”

  “No. But it connects Fisch to dealing in hot cash, doesn’t it? Considering the timing, very likely Lindbergh cash. I also talked to a guy named Gustave Mancke, who runs an ice-cream parlor in New Rochelle. He and his wife Sophie swear that for an eight-week period in January and February of ’32, right up to the Sunday before the kidnapping, Izzy Fisch ate in their shop every Sunday evening.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a revelation.”

  “It does when you consider Mancke claims Fisch would always meet with the same two people.”

  “Oh? And who did he meet with?”

  “Violet Sharpe,” he said, “and Ollie Whately.”

  31

  We had lunch on Italian Harlem’s market street—First Avenue—in a modest place called Guido’s where we had spaghetti and espresso. From our window seat we could see the crowded sidewalk where housewives bickered with vendors over greens, olives, cheeses, clams, whatever; it was an Italian version of Maxwell Street, a barrel of work gloves here, a bin of bread there, anything you needed, from pomegranates to underwear.

  “I always think of Harlem as Negro,” Evalyn admitted, as we began dessert, each of us working on a gaudy pastry.

  “East Harlem isn’t,” I said, cutting the dick-shaped sweet with a knife. “Lucky Luciano operates out of this part of town. Lucky and the boys noticed a long time ago there was money to be made in Negro Harlem.”

  “Money?”

  “Sure. Most of the big nightclubs in Harlem have Italian owners, or anyway mob guys like Owney Madden—you’ve heard of the Cotton Cl
ub, Evalyn? And a couple years ago, Luciano made his move on the colored numbers racket, from here.”

  “This apartment house we’re going to,” she said, “seems to be mostly Germans.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “In an Italian neighborhood?”

  “German immigrants can enter on a level the Italians have to work their way up to,” I said. “Don’t forget, wops are about as dark as white people get.”

  My remark seemed to disturb her. “Do you mean that, Nate?”

  “What do you mean, do I mean that?”

  “You don’t strike me as a bigoted person.”

  “Hey, I’m half Jew. I’d be in the same boat, if I hadn’t been dealt my mother’s physical traits. Don’t let’s go high-hat on me, Evalyn—most of your servants are colored, while none of the guests at your Washington soirees are…unless it’s the King of Zanzibar or something.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know when you’re kidding.”

  “That’s easy—when it sounds like I’m kidding, I’m not. When it sounds like I’m not kidding, I am.” I checked my watch. “I think we’ve killed enough time—we can visit Mrs. Henkel, now.”

  We’d called ahead to see Gerta Henkel, friend of both Richard and Anna Hauptmann, and she’d said to come over in the early afternoon; she and her husband Carl lived in Kohl’s rooming house at 149 East 127th, where Isidor Fisch had also lived. So had several other good friends of the Hauptmanns, from the clique of German immigrants who made merry at Hunter’s Island.

  I pulled the Packard into the Warner-Quinlan filling station at the corner of East 127th and Lexington, a large modem station with a service garage and billboards trumpeting itself on either side.

  “Do you know what this place is?” I asked Evalyn.

  “It’s a gas station, Nate. Don’t they have these in Chicago?”

  “It’s the gas station: the one where Hauptmann passed the gold certificate that got him caught. And just three doors down from here is Fisch’s apartment house.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Does that mean anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I got out of the Packard and, as he was filling the tank, asked the attendant if the manager was here.

  “Walter?” the mustached, geeky attendant asked. “Sure. You want I should get him?”