by Ed Ifkovic
“A maligning of a true American hero,” Aleck intoned on air. Darius Poor agreed. “Lunacy in the land.”
Of course, that broadcast brought out the loonies and the naysayers and the speculators and—and, well, enter Mavis Jones onto the scene, psychic and hearer of phantom Germanic voices in the wilderness of her scattered mind.
“Your fault…” I repeated to Aleck. “You cracked open the door of the asylum.”
Aleck smiled wanly. “I got a good dinner out of the evening.”
“What do you think?” I asked Willie, who, I noticed, had been paying attention to our conversation.
“Ma’am, as I say, I keep my mouth shut.”
“Yes…”
But he kept talking. “But it seems to me this is only the beginning of the circus.”
***
That night I sat on the edge of my bed, the radio on, listening to Walter Winchell’s radio broadcast. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea…” A clatter of telegraph keys—tap tap tap. That signature opening, followed by his staccato voice. Stops and starts, a broken rhythm that gave you a sense of immediacy. Hot off the press, Winchell sitting in your living room inside the Zenith console radio.
In my lap lay a copy of the day’s New York Daily Mirror, the tabloid rag Winchell wrote for.
Early that day I’d seen the man strutting into the hotel lobby, grabbing the sleeve of the undersheriff, Barry Barrowcliff, as he handed him a note. He threw a sidelong glance at another reporter from the Hearst syndicate and frowned at the Hearst darling, Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was signing an autograph with a flourish. A gaggle of fawners hovered nearby, laughing loudly. At one point Joshua Flagg skirted by him, and Winchell called out to him—”Sir, a minute of your time”—but Flagg kept moving. Winchell leaned on the reception counter, a casual pose as he began a loud screed about his belief that David Wilentz would exact a confession from Bruno Hauptmann on the stand.
So now I listened to Winchell’s summation of the day’s events of the trial, a rat-a-tat-tat delivery that soon waxed eloquent as he rhapsodized about Anne Lindbergh’s testimony, a bathetic encomium to her strength and beauty and resolve. A catch in his throat, he paused so that America could weep with him.
My Lord, I upbraided myself—I am so cynical. What is there about Winchell that so rankled?
He ended with a commentary about the prosecutor David Wilentz, “an advocate for justice,” and Edward Reilly, chief defense lawyer, a venerable old jurist, described as a “lackey in the employ of the underbelly of man’s reason. Bruno’s henchman.”
A man with a turn of phrase, that Winchell boy.
I waited as he spoke of little Flemington, of the “hominess” of the old village, of the venerable Union Hotel with its old-fashioned balconies and Victorian gingerbread trim, or the general store that still held a pickle barrel, the life of the average citizen. I waited. Not a single mention of the murder of Annabel Biggs, waitress at the Union Hotel Café. Not a word. I waited—that poor woman ignored and forgotten so soon. The golden god Lindbergh and demonic monster Hauptmann, the only antagonists in the Greek drama that was playing out against a Jersey backdrop.
I switched off the broadcast, annoyed by his ticker-tape delivery and smart-mouth tone.
I turned to his column in the Mirror.
Again, not a word about the murder of Annabel Biggs or the arrest of Cody Lee Thomas.
I lay in bed that night with an indelible image of that waitress—that brash woman filled with mystery, up to some mischief. A woman whose secrets leaked out of her, uncontrolled, dangerous. Perhaps she said something of her scheme, her…pot of gold. Not a woman I could ever like or care to know. Dead now, supposedly at the hands of Cody Lee Thomas, the big, hulking bull of a man who’d towered over her in the parking lot the other morning. I realized I’d have to talk to the police—to tell them what I heard. Not that it mattered—Cody Lee was already under arrest.
But…Annabel Biggs. What about her?
What about her?
Her murder? A life snapped to an end, brutal and raw.
Her life? Her moment?
She needed her justice. I felt it to my marrow.
Chapter Six
The police station was a squat white clapboard building tucked behind the courthouse, an unremarkable building in need of a coat of paint. A band of light-hearted, jostling reporters loitered on the sidewalk, positioned beneath the windows of the jail. A contingent of Jersey state troopers stood at attention by the front doors, their ornate uniforms making them seem colorful birds of prey. A modest station, I knew, but also the jail where Bruno Richard Hauptmann was housed in back, secure, waiting, pacing his cell, listening daily to the taunts from the passersby outside. “Kill Bruno. Kill the German.” That awful chant that erupted every so often, a flash fire of hate that sailed through the crisp January air and through the drafty sills of the station windows.
Inside, disarmed by the sudden quiet, I approached a desk where a dour-looking young man in a wrinkled uniform sat with his legs up, a newspaper draped over his chest. Thick eyeglasses with oversized horned rims had slipped down his nose. A blast of noise from outside broke the eerie silence—a reporter whooping it up—but the man, sitting up, paid it no mind. Nevertheless, I jumped, grabbed at the pearls around my neck—yes, they were still there, my touchstone to sanity—rattled by the awful juxtaposition of street chaos and the tomblike calm within this building.
“Help you, ma’am?”
I identified myself as Edna Ferber. He yawned, and I decided I could not possibly like him, though he showed a fresh-scrubbed innocence in that pale face. “I want to speak to the chief of police.”
“The sheriff?” he asked, stroking a thick moustache and running his fingers through his curly hair. “Busy at the courthouse. Can I help you?”
“And you are?”
He sat up, pushed out his chest where a badge identified him as Deputy Hovey Low. “In charge,” he added, a smile on his face.
“I’m here about the murder of Annabel Biggs.”
For a second he looked baffled, as though I’d broached an unfamiliar subject—and an unworthy one. But then his eyes widened and he nodded behind him. “Got the killer in back.”
He started to say something else, but then thought better of it. He flicked his head to a line of hard-backed chairs set against a wall. An old woman sat there, staring at us. Deputy Low frowned at her, and she dropped her eyes into her lap. A skeletal woman wrapped in a thin winter coat, her hands clutching a cloth hat that bore a cluster of paper roses scrunched along the brim. A hat best saved for a summer tea party, albeit one two decades back. Her fleshless face held huge, deep eyes, shadowed.
“Yes, well,” I went on, “my visit may not matter, but I feel it is my duty to…” I stumbled. I sensed the eyes of the old woman riveted on me, waiting, waiting. “It’s just that I happened to hear a disturbing quarrel of Annabel Biggs in the parking lot behind the Union Hotel the morning of the…the killing…and it was nasty and…the man…” I faltered, unsure of myself. I didn’t like to be so rattled—not an image I cultivated in myself, fearsome reporter that I always insisted I was. But—those eyes on me. I shot her a look—she wasn’t blinking. “This Annabel was a battler, I think, sort of loud and…” Again, I stopped, unsure.
Deputy Hovey Low reached behind him and removed a sheet from a folder resting on a filing cabinet. He handed it to me, though his fingertips held onto it too long. “This the man you seen?”
Dutifully I nodded. I was looking at a recent mug shot—full-face and profile—of Cody Lee Thomas. That severe face, almost insolent, angry. But also bewildered—at least as he was being booked. I flashed immediately to the much-publicized mug shots of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, that same hard-boiled penetrating stare, almost mesmerizing—but without the bafflement Cody Lee couldn’t mask. Hauptmann�
�s innate intelligence demanded you look at him. Poor Cody Lee wondered why anyone would want to. “Yes, that’s the man.”
“Yeah, we got lots of reports of them two battling it out in public like silly fools. Water and gasoline, them two. Sparks fly. I guess she was a firecracker and he was…” He stopped as he focused on the old woman who was sitting up straight now, her face drawn and still.
“I thought it my duty…”
But Hovey Low was through with me, settling back into a chair and holding out his hand for the mug shots. “Case closed.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
That bothered him. “Yep.”
“A confession from Cody Lee?”
“Dumb as an ox, that one.” He smirked as he reached for a wad of chewing tobacco. “But no, the man says he ain’t done it.”
Ain’t done it: the words echoed in my mind, a curious ungrammatical rhythm that was immediately so dismissive and—wrong.
I wasn’t through. “In my brief exchange with Annabel Biggs in the café, she struck me as a woman with”—I paused—“a larger purpose. Cocky, sure of herself, a woman who planned something.” I stressed the word. “A woman who set her sights on…” Now I stopped, held by the bleak look on Low’s face.
He wagged a finger at me. “The girl is dead, ma’am.”
“I know that, sir.”
“And her killer sits in back.” A sickly smile as he worked an unpleasant piece of tobacco into the corner of his mouth. But again he glanced at the old woman who watched me closely. He looked away and frowned. “I’ll tell the sheriff you stopped in.”
I was dismissed. Irritated, I swiveled, turned back to say something, but Deputy Low had buried his face in the newspaper. He was reading the funny papers, I noticed. The Katzenjammer Kids. I read over his shoulder. “Gas Buggins.” “Dickie Dare” with Cranky Joe. Delightful, I thought. Slapdash buffoons with exclamation points in the balloons over their heads. A childish smile on his face as he moved his lips.
I walked out in the cold morning sunshine and stood on the sidewalk, stared at by attentive state troopers. The spent light bulbs from the photographers’ cameras littering the sidewalk popped as folks stepped on them. As I walked into the street, I heard movement behind me.
“Miss Ferber.”
The old woman had followed me out of the jail.
In the biting cold air she stood too close to me, her trembling face inches from mine. You saw a pinched woman, a starved barnyard pullet, tiny with so little flesh on her old bones, a caved-in face the color of parchment. Maybe late sixties, with that look of someone who had struggled through a raw, niggling life, the years dropping away, unnoticed, unwanted. I suppose it was her eyes: a washed-out cornflower pale blue, but haunting—the ferocity in them belying the resignation the rest of her body communicated. She stood there, silent, one hand moved to her stringy hair and tucking a loose strand under the old-fashioned cloth hat with bunched-up roses. For a moment she shivered, her chin dipping into her chest.
Then, surprisingly, that same hand slowly reached out and grasped my forearm. Though I wore my fur coat, insulated against the cold day, her touch was electric, a bolt that made me gasp.
“Yes?”
“I’m Cora Lee Thomas.” A strangled whisper escaped her throat. “Cody Lee’s ma.” She pointed back to the jail, her fleshless fingertips suspended in the air.
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“They won’t let me see my boy until Sheriff Curtiss returns. I been waiting all morning.”
“That’s unconscionable.”
She squinted at me. “Don’t know what that’s about, but they promised me.”
“You wanted to talk to me?”
She nodded. “I heard you in there.” Again, she pointed back to the jail.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Thomas. I know I spoke against your son, but…”
She broke in, heated. “No, no, don’t. You done what you got to do, Miss Ferber. And”—she actually smiled and I noticed a missing tooth that made her look frail—“it was what everyone tells them. Cody Lee and that Annabel woman was like hateful cats tucked under a blanket in a straw basket. Sooner or later the claws come out.”
“And yet they saw each other.”
She scoffed. “Strange words, them ones. ‘Saw each other.’ My Cody is a foolish boy—man, of course—but one long given to boyish infatuations. All his life, and him thirty-five next Tuesday. A girl looks at him and he…like melts. This Annabel, she…” One of the reporters monitoring the jail stepped closer, peering at the two of us. A passing car backfired, and someone applauded. Another reporter joined the first, watching me, perhaps hoping for any tidbit of Lindbergh fodder.
“Buy you a cup of coffee at the drug store?” she asked in a low voice.
She pointed to Maynard’s Drug Store a few storefronts over. I nodded.
Inside, the soda fountain counter was packed, a few folks swiveling on the stools checking us out. Reporters, mainly, because I recognized one from a Milwaukee news syndicate. He glanced at me, recognizing me, and then at Cora Lee Thomas, whom he didn’t. His eyes drifted down her shabby coat, her withered face. He turned away. Cora Lee strode to the back of the drug store, chose a marble-topped ice-cream parlor table by the kitchen door, lost in the shadow from the brick wall, and sat down with her back to the customers. I slid into a chair opposite her. We said nothing as I ordered two coffees, mine with whipped cream, the waitress never removing the pencil tucked into her hair, just nodding and walking away. “Black,” Cora Lee yelled after the waitress. “But real hot, please.”
“Tell me what you want,” I began.
A long sigh that broke at the end. “No one believes my Cody Lee is innocent.”
A heartbeat. “And you think I do?”
She smiled thinly. “Yes.”
“But why?”
She shrugged. “I heard you talk of Annabel in there. You didn’t like her.”
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe your son killed her. There are hundreds of people I dislike, some I actually despise, but I don’t believe they should be murdered.” I smiled. “Tempting as it sometimes is for me.”
She shook her head back and forth. “You showed up there. The jail. Something bothered you.” She drew her lips into a razor-thin line. “He was with me that night, Miss Ferber. And the sheriff won’t believe me.” She locked eyes with mine. “You will.”
“Why?”
“You’re not a fool.”
“Tell me.”
“Let me tell you first about Cody Lee, my boy.” She took a deep breath. “A good boy, but always a slow one. A kind boy. Gentle. Trusting.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Only that he’s the kind what has a heart easily broken. Like he meets a girl and he thinks—well, I’ll marry her and we’ll have children and…” She threw back her head. “It never works out.” Her eyes brightened. “Like some foolish girl who goes to a dance and comes home and dreams of cottages and white picket fences. Well, that’s my boy.”
“Where are you from?” I wondered about the accent, a mixture of country twang and clipped drawl.
“We come out of the Sourland Mountains, back of Princeton. Tarpaper shack and dirt roads and coyotes and mountain lions. Near to where Colonel Lindbergh built at Hopewell.” She clicked her tongue. “Back then you could climb a fir tree and see the roof of his house. Before the tragedy. My husband hauled lumber like Cody Lee does. A little bootlegging, some. But the Depression stunned the land there. A fire one night, real bad. My husband died, my children were long gone then, dying young, except for Cody Lee. Him and me—all that’s left. I got me a cousin down here who says an old farm couple need a housekeeper and a handyman.” She grinned. “Mother-and-son team, one size fits all.”
She stopped talking as the waitress pla
ced two cups of coffee on the table, then backed away.
“Tell me about Annabel Biggs.”
For a moment her face closed in, her mouth sagging. “Cody Lee mostly helps out at the farm, keeps the outside humming. Old couple—the Myersons own it, too old to do anything now—so Cody does the lifting, as needed. Winters, like now, like his daddy, he hauls timber up to the mills in Trenton. One night, back down here, outside of town, he stops for a beer at this roadhouse. The Oak Tavern, a speakeasy now legal as all get out. That’s where he met this Annabel, fresh to town. She’s hired because of the trial. I guess they sort of liked each other, leastwise that’s what he told me, but he’s a quiet sort, painfully shy around girls, even though he’s now thirty-five years old. Two girls in all his life, both fickle, walked away from him and he mooned over them for years.”
“Annabel?” I prodded.
“Well, yes, Annabel, she likes him, looking for a guy to take her around—buy stuff. I mean Cody Lee is big and tough-looking, that rough face, but a nice smile and dimples—and kindness women can pick up on right away. Like a puppy that catches your eye, makes you smile.”
“They went out?”
“They seen each other a lot for a few weeks, I guess. I mean, I know the little cash he got hauling lumber disappeared at the roadhouse. He’d pick her up in his old pickup and off they’d go.”
I sipped my coffee. “You ever meet her?”
“Once. Like when he was taken with her, he brung her to the farm. All the whistles in a mother’s head start to go off. A gold-digger where there was no gold to dig. You know what I mean? She struck me as a shifty girl biding her time. Looking for fun and games until she was ready to move on. Her eyes were always looking over her shoulder—at the horizon.”
“Why? What did she say to you?”
She thought for a second as she ran her fingertip along the rim of the cup. “It warn’t so much what she said, Miss Ferber, it was the way she was. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like Cody Lee was a play toy, like one of those wooden toys you pull along on a string. Head bobbing, eyes bulging. She liked the dumb attention from him. I seen her teasing but in a mean way. She ain’t a nice woman, her with that British accent and all. That was clear to me. It was also clear that she didn’t care for him.”
