Cold Morning

by Ed Ifkovic

  “Was the room a mess?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Things strewn about? Anything taken?”

  “Well, she was still wearing her ring, but I know she said it was a real gemstone—like a sapphire—but I can tell paste, honey. Woolworth’s bargain bin all the way.” A faraway look came into her eyes. She stood and walked over to Annabel’s dresser. She swung back, puzzled. “Annabel was always reading these letters she saved.”

  “Letters?”

  “Yeah, a stack of them.”

  “And?” Echoes of Cody Lee mentioning letters…but what did that mean?

  “They ain’t here now.”

  My pulse quickened. “Someone took them?”

  “Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe she put them back in the drawer.” She pulled open a top drawer. “She always kept them here.” She drew her lips into a thin line. “Nope. Gone.” For a second her eyes flitted around the room, nervous. She bit the corner of a polished nail.

  I looked at Aleck. “What does this mean?”

  He arched his hands. “Obviously, the murderer took them, Edna.”

  “I know that,” I said, irritated. “But what does it mean?”

  “You’re assuming a lot, Edna. This could mean nothing.”

  “Or something. There was no reason for Cody Lee to take them.”

  Aleck addressed Peggy. “Were they about him?”

  She moved to the window and looked down into the street. “I don’t like this talk. All of this.” Her eyes got cloudy. “I think someone was following her. I mean, one time she said she felt there was always someone in the shadows, watching.”

  “Cody Lee?” From Aleck.

  She shook her head and sank into a chair. “Naw. Leastwise I don’t think so. She said she felt it when they were together sometimes. Like a shadow nearby that moved away when she got near.” She shivered. “I told her it was a ghost.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m not liking any of this. I’m getting spooked.” Her voice shaking, she looked down into her lap, but, in an unguarded moment, twisted her head to the side. “I really have to go out…”

  “Looks to me like you are ready,” I said.

  She didn’t like that. “I like my privacy.”

  A figure in the shadows. The one I saw—that cold morning when I overheard the spat in the parking lot. A shadow? A lurker? Someone waiting to kill her. To take some letters? What did all this mean?

  I shifted the direction of the conversation. “Did she like the job at the hotel?”

  “She liked the money, but she said she was gonna quit in a bit.”

  “Why?”

  A sliver of a smile. “Oh, the old gravy train coming in.”

  “Meaning?” From Aleck.

  “She came here because someone was gonna give her big money.”

  “But who?”

  She wasn’t listening. “And she told me I’d get some of it. If I helped her out.”

  “Help her out how?” Aleck sat up, interested.

  Again a barely whispered word. “Lindbergh.”

  Silence in the room.

  The sound of footsteps in the hallway.

  Aleck cleared his throat and leaned in. “Peggy, my dear, you’re not telling us something.”

  She tossed back her shoulders. “Don’t matter no more anyhow. She’s gone. Whatever gravy train was coming in now is long gone from the station.”

  “But what about Lindbergh?” I asked. “Yes, she came here for a job—because of the trial. The opportunity…”

  The look on her face stopped me, hard, haughty. “You just don’t get it.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “She said she knew something that was gonna get her big money.”

  “From Lindbergh? Blackmail?”

  “Dunno.” Another shrug. “I mean, she could’ve just been crowing big-time—like she was a braggart. Put a little liquor in the broad and, well…I only got bits and pieces when she was a little, you know, tipsy. She could get chatty then. Like she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Like it spilled out of her. She had to tell someone. Bubbly. Then, sober the next morning, she denied everything. ‘You ain’t heard me right.’ That’s what she said to me.”

  “Tell us what you remember.”

  “I don’t know if…”

  Aleck’s voice got sharp, insistent. “Who wrote those letters, Peggy dear?”

  She debated what to say but finally, in a small echoey voice, she muttered, “Violet Sharp.”

  My head swam. I looked at Aleck, who was slack-jawed, eyes bright. “Violet Sharp?” he repeated.

  She nodded. “Yes. Violet Sharp.” She trembled. “The one in the newspaper.”

  Violet Sharp. Aleck and I exchanged knowing glances.

  Anyone following the Lindbergh kidnapping understood how explosive those two words were. Violet Sharp, a girl who figured prominently back in the days immediately after the kidnapping. She’d been the downstairs maid at the Dwight Morrow mansion in Englewood, New Jersey. Charles Lindbergh had insisted his servants—and those at his mother-in-law’s mansion—not be interviewed, trusting them, insisting they be left alone. The state police, under Colonel Schwarzkopf, initially suspected an inside job, largely because Charles and Anne usually spent the week at Englewood and only weekends at Hopewell, their unfinished homestead. But because Little Lindy had a bad cold, Anne called to say they’d be staying in Hopewell and could the chauffeur drive the nurse, Betty Gow, to help care for the baby? Violet Sharp took the call at eleven-thirty that morning. Somehow, then, the kidnapper knew the Lindberghs were staying in Hopewell.

  Despite Colonel Lindbergh’s adamant stance, all the servants were routinely interviewed, and were compliant and cleared. But Violet posed a problem. She was agitated, uncooperative. And the newspapers made much of her evasions. She couldn’t recall where she’d been that awful windy night, at first saying she was at the movies in Englewood, then changing her story. She was with a man named Ernie, no last name, and two of his friends. Then she said she’d been to the Peanut Grill, a speakeasy in Orangeburg, New York, but drank only coffee and danced a bit—back home by eleven.

  An attractive brunette, given to flirtations, Violet Sharp shifted from cooperation to belligerence. At twenty-seven, she’d emigrated from England to Canada in 1929 with her sister, Emily, in the United States nine months later at the YWCA in Manhattan. Mrs. Morrow hired her, and liked her, though other servants said she was moody, sometimes hysterical, often coy and mysterious—a woman who savored her time away from the mansion. During the course of three interviews she’d changed: a precipitous drop in weight, some forty pounds, the once-plump and sassy girl now cowering and jittery. She fainted at an interview. Her decline began with the discovery of the baby’s body.

  Colonel Schwarzkopf believed she’d been the informant—unwittingly or not—alerting the kidnappers to the baby being in Hopewell that night. He sent Inspector Henry Walsh to do another interview. Walsh, a blunt, threatening officer, had little patience with the evasive Violet, who, during a previous interview when she’d gotten hysterical, still managed to smile and wink at a secretary as she left the room. The police didn’t trust her.

  She vowed not to be interviewed again. When officers arrived at the mansion, she rushed upstairs, mixed powdered silver polish into a glass of water—a concoction containing cyanide chloride, a milky-white liquid—and walked down the stairs, a gurgling sound from the back of her throat, where she collapsed. She was dead.

  Dwight Morrow, Jr., summoned by a servant, carried her body up to her bedroom.

  Mrs. Morrow, in talking to the press, said Violet had “simply been frightened to death.”

  Colonel Schwarzkopf announced to the press that her suicide confirmed his suspicion that she had knowledge of the crime against Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

  Lindbe
rgh himself rejected the idea.

  Violet’s sister, Emily, who had been employed nearby at Constance Chilton’s home, had applied for a visa to return to Tult’s Clump in England on March first, the day of the kidnapping. On April first, four days after the ransom was delivered, she sailed back home. She never informed the authorities. Back in England she told the indignant press that the police had hounded her innocent sister. “Death by Third Degree,” screamed the London Daily Mirror.

  Violet remained one of the nagging mysteries of the kidnapping saga, unanswered.

  The London press still clamored for answers.

  The British Consul sent flowers to her funeral.

  “Violet Sharp?” I said again, breathless.

  Peggy nodded. She pointed to the top of the dresser, now empty of the letters she’d mentioned. “She wrote them letters to Annabel, Violet did.”

  “But why?”

  She blinked wildly. “A secret she told only me. They was cousins from England. They grew up together—Annabel and Violet and Violet’s sister, Emily, the one who skedaddled back to England before the cops could question her.”

  “Oh my God,” exclaimed Aleck.

  “Indeed.” My word was swallowed.

  Aleck was muttering to himself. “But what did Violet tell her cousin?” He fumbled. “I mean…well, blackmail? How?”

  Peggy sighed. “She didn’t like to talk much about them, the two sisters. I guess Emily and Annabel didn’t like each other—but Violet liked Annabel. I asked her if Violet was…like murdered. Not a suicide. It seemed strange to hear that a young girl would kill herself like that. But then Annabel started to cry. But she said no, Violet was always a temperamental girl, melodramatic, a little crazy.”

  “But the letters had to be important if someone took them?”

  “Maybe took them,” she stressed. “Maybe Annabel got rid of them and I didn’t notice.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No.” A simple, emphatic response. “Not really.”

  “Then what?”

  Aleck softened his voice and reached out a hand to pat the back of Peggy’s wrist. She melted. “What did Violet reveal in the letters? What do you know? And how could it lead to a payoff now for Annabel? Did she expect Lindbergh to pay her money? For what? Silence?”

  She looked toward the door and walked to a mirror to check her makeup. When she spotted lipstick on her tooth, she reached for a tissue and dabbed at it. Her tone addressing Aleck was confidential. “Look, I guess Violet liked to go to roadhouses back in the day when there was Prohibition and such. But she got this infatuation for some guy who lived on another rich estate nearby, some wealthy friend of the Morrows. One of the son’s old friends—the son named Dwight Morrow—a guy who used to come around. A handsome devil-may-care smooth-talking fool, money dripping out of his pockets, but a real Casanova, that one. He wooed the girls and then said goodbye. I guess Violet caught his eye one night. Like she’d flirt even with the rich guys. She was a pretty young thing, I suppose, with that British accent that American men get dizzy over, though she was a little plump—like yours truly.” She beamed at Aleck. “Some men like a little meat on the bone.” A stiffled giggle. “Anyhow, she said that this rich guy and Dwight took her in a roadster to some speakeasies.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  Hesitation. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”

  “His name,” I insisted.

  “Blake Somerville. But you can’t repeat that to anyone. You know, his father was, like, the lieutenant governor of New Jersey. They own, like—like, these oil refineries on the shore—that give Jersey that sickening smell. But real rich, that family. That’s what Annabel said.” She paused, looked toward the door. “I mean, Violet could have been making up the story. She was a maid, for God’s sake. Rich boys don’t take maids to roadhouses.” A pause. “Well, maybe they do, if you know what I mean. But it could be nonsense, something you write in a letter to impress your poor cousin. Violet, Annabel said, had these flights of fancy.”

  “But I can’t connect the dots,” I said. “How could Annabel arrive in Flemington with the goal of blackmailing Charles Lindbergh? How would she get at him? And what information would he pay for?”

  Peggy waited a long time. “Well, Annabel said someone in the Morrow family…like, knew something. Something Violet confided—it was worth its weight in gold, she said. And Colonel Lindbergh would not want his wife, Anne, and her mother embarrassed. It would mean Colonel Lindbergh made a mistake when he shut down the interviews at first. Doing that, you know, led to a sad ending. I mean, the Morrows are Jersey royalty, for Christ’s sake.”

  I nodded at Aleck. “So Annabel was going to use the letters to get Lindbergh to pay money. To buy her silence. There must have been something in the letters about the kidnapping. Something that involved the Morrow estate.”

  Peggy breathed in, finished now, her eyes staring at me. “No, I…”

  “You what?” said Aleck, gently.

  “I don’t wanna say no more.” Peggy stood up. She was shaking. “I made a mistake here.”

  Aleck poured on the charm. She’d stepped toward the door, but he stretched out his hand, tapping her wrist affectionately. It took some effort on his part. “There was more in the letters, right?” he coaxed her.

  “Not them letters.”

  “But what?” I said too loudly and she grimaced. Her indifference to me—perhaps dislike?—bothered me, but of course I lacked Aleck’s mysterious allure.

  “Peggy, my lovely dear…” From Aleck, not me.

  “There was one letter she wouldn’t show me.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Insurance, she said.”

  “It was with the others?”

  She shook her head. “Never was in the pile.” A sly grin. “I checked once. She let me read those letters, sort of proud of them. Like her place in history, sort of. But one time she waved this other letter at me, the last one before Violet offed herself with that silver polish. Maybe she carried it with her. Or she hid it. She said it was the key to the vault.”

  Involuntarily I spun around, searching the corners of the room. “Here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you find it?”

  A sigh. “Never gave it no mind because of her, you know, murder. That spooked me. I forgot about the letters—the letter. The whole thing was dead with Annabel.”

  “Then it’s here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Well…”

  “We have to find it, dear,” Aleck whispered.

  But at that moment there was a loud rapping on the door, and we all jumped. Unfortunately, I emitted a Victorian scream worthy of a heroine in Tempest and Sunshine. I flushed, horrified.

  Peggy rushed to the door, although she paused to primp herself in the mirror before turning the knob. But conscious of Aleck and me nearby, she inched the door open slowly, probably with the purpose of concealing the visitor in the hallway. Her escort for the evening? Someone who’d be quickly shooed away.

  “Christ, not you again.”

  The door flew open.

  Joshua Flagg stood there. “Excuse me, Miss Crispen…”

  He stopped abruptly as he peered into the room, looking past her, flabbergasted to discover Edna Ferber and Aleck Woollcott sitting primly on the chairs, eyes focused on the annoying young Hearst upstart.

  “I told you not to come back,” Peggy roared at him. “I ain’t talking to you. I ain’t got nothing to tell you. Annabel’s killer is in jail. You gotta leave me alone. ” She looked back at us. “Christ Almighty, my room is like Grand Central Station today.”

  Sheepish, sputtering, Joshua stepped back and disappeared from view. His hasty footsteps galloped down the stairs.

  Chapter Nine

  The letter.
>
  “Aleck, you have to get that letter.”

  “Edna dear, this obsession of yours.”

  “Did you hear me, Aleck?”

  “I’m not deaf, and your voice usually has the timbre of a train whistle roaring into a station.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  He smiled maliciously. “That woman finds me charming. Alluring, if you will. A novelty for me, titillating though unwanted.”

  “And a form of madness.”

  He chuckled. “Jealousy, my dear.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  He nodded “A glance from me and she wilts like a morning glory in the afternoon sun.”

  I ignored that. “Good.” I tapped his sleeve. “Now, Aleck.”

  We were sitting in the lobby of the hotel later that night, though it was difficult to concentrate because of the hullabaloo and stampede of eager feet. Reporters everywhere, bumping into one another, occasionally glancing at the two of us as we sat quietly in the plush armchairs, each with a cup of coffee on a side table.

  “Now,” I repeated, “you know Peggy is searching that dismal room for the hidden letter. Tearing off the wallpaper. You do know that, Aleck? You could see it in her eye, that panic, that urgency.”

  “It’s late—she seemed to be waiting for a suitor to knock on her door. I mean, she sent us packing after that Joshua fellow fled down the stairs.”

  “Yes—and while I was in the middle of a question.”

  “You’re always in the middle of a question, Ferb.”

  “Be that as it may—go. She may be back home now.”

  “What makes you certain she’ll reveal its contents to me?”

  I sucked in my lips. “You flatter her, lisp at her, flutter, and twinkle those night-owl eyes of yours. A hint of cheese strudel on your breath—I have no idea. For some reason she finds you—to use your word—alluring.” I looked around the room. “There must be something foul in the tap water of New Jersey.”

  “Women have found me attractive, dear Ferb.” A sloppy grin. “You know, all the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening.”

  “Do you find her attractive, Aleck?”