by Ed Ifkovic
“Well, that may be true. But he was not alone. Maybe he’s just guilty of greed—extortion, him and that pathetic con man, Isidor Fisch. We may never know.”
Aleck’s voice broke. “Enough, Edna.”
“You’re getting angry.”
Aleck locked eyes with mine. “I am angry. With you. You are headed up the wrong street, my dear.” He hissed his words. “Your monomaniacal obsession with Annabel’s murder and her preposterous story has clouded your vision. Schoolgirls with fairy tales they write to each other.”
“No.”
He held up his hand. “Enough.”
“I…”
He snarled. “Are you rehearsing your next diabolic column with me now? Will I find these words echoed in tomorrow’s Times? Didn’t your encomium to the dead beautiful Violet satisfy your lust for notoriety?” A high laugh. “I can see it now. Here’s a headline for you—A Violet Wilted.” Then in a tinny singsong voice he warbled, “Roses are red, Violet is dead.”
“You’re not funny.”
He stood and was thrusting his arm into the sleeve of his overcoat. “I’m a forthright man, a little bizarre, admittedly. I’m considered the wittiest man in America, Edna.”
I bit my lip. “And often the most unkind.”
He left me sitting in the booth. I sipped my coffee slowly.
Back in the car, I asked Willie why he hadn’t come into the restaurant for coffee.
“Got me a bag of the wife’s gingersnaps.” He held up a paper bag, wrinkled and folded over. “And besides I seen that you two needed to have a chat about something. You was both all jumpy and twitching.”
Aleck chortled. “Words that have never been used before with the estimable Edna Ferber.”
When we were on the road, Aleck faced away from me, but I could tell by the flushed neck and the red spots on his cheeks that he was boiling. Finally, a half-hour into the ride, he glanced furtively at me, a mischievous glint in his eyes, magnified by the owl-like eyeglasses he wore, as he leaned forward in the seat, addressing Willie.
“Tell me, Willie, my friend, what do you think of Miss Ferber’s wide goose chases?”
“Ain’t my business. As I was saying to Marcus just yesterday, these excursions pay for food on my table.”
“But let me ask you this—what do you think of Bruno Hauptmann?”
“I already told you.”
“He already told us,” I seethed, “back at the start of the trial. He believes Bruno is guilty.”
“That I do, now more than ever.”
That surprised me. “Why more now?”
“I hear folks talking in the bars at night. I listen good. That ladder, for one.”
“A shoddy construction,” I noted. “Bruno is a seasoned carpenter.”
“And he got them eyes.”
“Tell me,” I prodded him.
He caught my glance in the rearview mirror. “Cold, like steel balls. That man ain’t got no emotion.”
“Yes, a severe man, arrogant…”
“No, he got iron his veins. Not blood.”
“Still and all, a man…”
Aleck broke in. “A killer of babies.”
“One, possibly, Aleck. Just one. And the jury is out.”
“The war done it,” Willie snapped.
“What?” From Aleck.
“I read that he was dragged into the Kaiser’s army when he was seventeen. A boy. Impressionable. Made him a machine-gunner. A boy. They turned him into a monster, that’s what war does to boys.”
“Good point.” I said.
His voice cracked. “My only son—he fought in the war. The American side, of course. He came back someone I don’t know. He stares off into space—blubbers. Now he’s gone off to California, left a wife and kid behind. The war is a bitter teacher.”
“I agree, Willie,” but I added, “A young man’s bones not fully formed yet. Not yet a man. A boy, subjected to the horrors of that war. He was gassed, in fact.”
“But that ain’t no excuse,” Willie insisted. “When he got back home, yes, the land was bare and people starved, so he took up crime. He climbed a ladder to break into the mayor’s home. He robbed women with baby carriages at gunpoint. He took their loaves of bread. He escaped from jail.” His fingers punctuated the remarks by drumming the steering wheel. “Look at his eyes, Miss Ferber.”
“I have.”
Aleck smirked. “As well as thousands of other women.”
“Hard, as I say. Marbles.”
“So the workings of the trial mean nothing?” I asked him.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he’s already convicted?”
“Yes, ma’am. They’re going through the motions. The only thing left is to burn him in the chair.”
I shivered. “Hardly American, Willie. We have laws. Innocent until…”
“Guilty. Plain as the nose on your face.”
Aleck was laughing. “The common man has spoken.”
I glared at him.
We arrived back at Flemington as darkness fell, and I wanted to grab a bite, draw a hot bubble bath, and surrender to a good night’s sleep. A few stragglers stared at us as we stepped out of the car, but Aleck lagged behind, signaling to another reporter from the Daily Mirror that he’d like a few words. They’d shared a space when Aleck wrote drama criticism for The New Yorker. I waved good night and left.
But I was drawn to the noise coming from Nellie’s Tavern and glanced in. A rowdy crowd of tipsy reporters and hangers-on. But what alarmed me was the laughter. The sequestered jurors on the floor above, two to a room, listening to the chants from outside—that incessant “Kill Bruno” that rarely disappeared—but also the glib pronouncements of the reporters, bored and drunk and happy, on the floor below. Kill Bruno? Was that refrain etched onto their brains and souls? I hoped not.
Suddenly some wag stepped into the center of the room and bellowed some doggerel that mocked Bruno’s misuse of the English language, his bowdlerized phraseology, his garbled German-laced English.
Is das nicht ein ransom note?
Ja, das ist ein ransom note.
Is das nicht peculiar?
Ja, it’s damn peculiar.
Peculiar
Is das nicht ein singnatue?
Ja, das ist ein singnature.
Everyone roared, thrilled, glasses raised. Above them the jurors sat through the long Sunday.
I moved on to my room, dispirited. Echoes of that verse played over and over in my head.
Suddenly I thought: Three blind mice three blind mice see how they run see how they run they all ran after…
Did you ever see such a sight in your life?
In the upstairs hallway, as I searched for my key, I gazed out the window into the quiet street below. Under the streetlight Horace Tripp loitered. He threw back his head, enjoying the moment, probably something said by the vivacious woman hanging onto his arm, a woman definitely not his wife, Martha. As I watched, Horace tucked his arm around the woman’s waist, and I imaged her giggling because she tossed her head coyly. Horace was dressed for a Broadway matinee, I thought: a fur-collared Chesterfield overcoat, unbuttoned, thrown over a dark gray double-breasted suit. His black-and-white patent leather shoes sparkled, his careful spats shimmered. A dandy, this one, a low-rent Jersey playboy out on the town. A man who’d wear a tuxedo to a barn dance and then wonder why he didn’t fit in. The man who loved women—and there always was a new one waiting for his touch.
He nuzzled his face into the young woman’s neck, and she squirmed.
I found my key. Bedtime.
Chapter Nineteen
The crowd swelled, stood on shoulders, cursed, begged, and bribed the sheriff. Two men jostled for a spot on a hot cast-iron radiator.
“Bruno Richard Hauptmann, take the
stand.”
Aleck and I sat shoulder to shoulder on benches on the side, staring into the excited faces of Ginger Rogers and Sheilah Graham, both dressed for a Hollywood premiere in furs and diamonds.
Hauptmann walked quickly to the seat, sat down, crossed his legs, and looked surprisingly at ease. A guard stood behind him. The overhead light caught the high cheekbones, the small mouth, the celebrated triangular chin mentioned so often in news reports—“How like the police composite drawing,” the Daily Mirror rhapsodized. “A photograph, if you will.” Those deep-set riverbed blue eyes under carefully combed muddy blond hair. A charcoal double-breasted suit that fit his wiry, muscular body snugly, perfectly.
A matinee idol, this one, the darker negative of the farm boy Lindbergh in his ill-fitting suit and soft, slack face. The heavy, this Bruno, in a nineteenth-century melodrama. Do not hiss the villain! But of course everyone did, but not in the courtroom, although a man near me muttered, “Look at him, the killer.” A low hiss seeped into the room from the gallery, unnoticed by the judge.
Bruno leaned back, almost a wise-guy smile on his face, which was not a good idea. Here, I realized, was a man who fully expected to be exonerated because, as he would tell everyone in earshot, he was innocent.
Innocent.
When he opened his mouth, people leaned forward, attempting to grasp every syllable of the heavily accented voice. A low, thick rumble, a man in full possession.
The questioning began.
Defense lawyer Reilly’s pepper-shot questioning—Bruno in Germany, in the army at seventeen, twenty months under fire on the Western Front, his return home at nineteen, his struggle in the impoverished Germany. His convictions and his illegal entry into America. Bruno smiled at the memory. Thrifty, a hard-worker. “I opened right in the beginning a bank account.” His marriage two years later to Anna Schoeffer.
On and on, through the morning and the afternoon, the hammered-home testimony, as he came off a little bit self-possessed. A smile. The story of his life in the Bronx.
“On the night of April 2, 1932, after you came from your work in the neighborhood at six o’clock, did you leave your home?”
Charles Lindbergh sat up straight, glared. He’d testified that he’d been at St. Raymond’s Cemetery that night, sitting in a Ford coupe, and heard Hauptmann yell, “Hey, Doctor” to Dr. Condon. The ransom delivered.
“No, sir,” Bruno stressed.
“You were at your apartment all the time?”
“All the time.”
Aleck whispered to me, “No jury of fatuous women would ever find such a man guilty.”
“Rather presumptuous, no?” I shot back.
He snickered, coughed a bit. “And you’d be the foreman of that jury, rah-rah-rah pom-poms hurled into the air. You go, Bruno!”
I smiled thinly. “Aleck, you understand so little about women.”
“What woman does not wish to be told she is desirous? He does that with his mesmerizing stare.”
“You curse him because of his looks?”
“You forgive him because of them.” He went on. “He gets mash letters, that man. Love tokens. Seventy-five letters a day at the jail—schoolgirls who swoon, supporting him, astrologers predicting a happy future, autograph requests—even an invitation to a barn dance in Arkansas when he’s freed. But leave the wife at home.” He glanced around the room to find Bruno’s wife, Anna. “She probably gets hate mail.”
I stared at the sad woman, her face tense, her eyes hooded. She wore a simple blue dress, the kind you’d wear to shop for groceries. She kept her eyes on her husband, fearful, though now and then her gaze drifted out the window. Of course, she knew she’d have her turn up there, her own fresh hell. “She does. But not for the simplistic reasons you’re giving.”
“Watch the women in the room,” Aleck said, swiveling around in his seat. “The rapture, the awe, the beatific glory oozing from heavily rouged faces.”
“Quiet, Aleck. People are looking at you.”
“They’re looking at Bruno.”
“Quiet.”
He sunk his head into his chest. “‘The law is a ass.’”
“Nicely original.”
“I didn’t say it was.” One last remark before he turned away. “I do realize that you knew Dickens personally.”
The long day ended when Judge Trenchard adjourned court at four-thirty.
***
The court resumed the following morning, Bruno fresh, lively, spiffy in his double-breasted suit.
Bruno’s attitude surprised me: cocky, almost flippant, a man who emitted an awful sense of superiority. Rigid, brusque, his responses tight and clipped, he showed little humility or fear. I glanced at Charles Lindbergh sitting four chairs away, and noticed a trace of color rising in his cheeks. His eyes never left the defendant, but it was hard to interpret his look: a blankness, as though he needed to regard Bruno as a cipher, a stranger who got in his way as he walked by.
Watching Lindbergh, I noticed the line of men gathered at the back wall. A reporter was bent over, illicitly recording the proceedings, though no one seemed to care. Another was using the back of a colleague to jot down notes. Lynn Fontaine, dressed in a cranberry-colored suit with rhinestones in her hair, looked back and spotted lounge singer Helen Morgan, and she yelled, “Darling, darling, oh Helen. I made it today.” The judge looked down, frowned, and slammed his gavel. Bruno never looked over, intent on Reilly’s questioning. Bruno’s alibi—Isidor Fisch and the shoebox.
“Before he sailed, did Fisch leave anything with you for you to take care of while he was away?”
“He left two suitcases.”
“What else?”
“Four hundred fur skins—Hudson seal.”
“What else?”
“A little box.”
The ransom money in the broom closet. Fisch died. The water leak in the attic. The discovery of the money.
The kidnapping.
“On the night of March 1, 1932, did you enter the nursery of Colonel Lindbergh…?”
“I did not.”
“….and take from that nursery Charles Lindbergh, Jr.?”
“I did not.”
A rustling behind me, a reporter cursing another. I looked back. Horace Tripp stood in back, shoulder to shoulder with the mysterious Joshua Flagg. For a second I thought their standing together was accidental because the room that normally held two hundred had easily five hundred souls gasping for space. But as I watched, Joshua whispered something to Horace, who nodded, whispered something back, and the men shared a conspiratorial smile. Yes, I told myself, they could still be strangers—albeit Flagg spent much of his time in the café and doubtless Horace had engaged him in talk before—but there was something about the exchange: an intimate camaraderie, some shared wisdom, old friends who understood each other.
What also intrigued me was that Horace was wearing the same formal attire I’d spotted him in last night as he stood under the streetlight with the woman who was definitely not his wife—the same out-on-the-town garb with white spats and the elegant Chesterfield overcoat slung over his forearm. But he looked a tad dissolute, his hair not shiny and slicked over now, his face drawn and gray, and some of the pearl buttons on his tuxedo shirt seemed misaligned. I took all that in as he stood there, showcased under the shrill overhead light. Had he traipsed over to the courthouse from his midnight rendezvous?
Joshua Flagg wore a wide-striped suit jacket, vaguely zoot suit from a backwater vaudeville review, with a garish purple tie, poorly knotted. A diamond stickpin caught the overhead light, and I wondered whether it were real. If so, it would be the only genuine thing about the enigmatic man.
“I ask you again,” Reilly went on. “Were you in Hopewell, New Jersey, on March 1, 1932?”
“I was not.”
Reilly pointed to the notorious ladd
er.
“Did you build that ladder?”
Bruno, a voice filled with scorn. “I am a carpenter.” A moment passed. “Looks like a music instrument.”
The spectators howled.
“On the night of November 2, 1933, did you go to the Sheridan Square Theater in Greenwich Village?”
“No, it is my birthday.”
Walter Winchell made an audible sound. The movie at that theater was his own Broadway Through a Keyhole. The cashier had identified Bruno as the man who flicked her one of the ransom bills, then fled.
“I was never there.”
Judge Trenchard called a recess for lunch, and the sheriff led the jurors out the side door, guarded by state troopers, headed across the street to the Union Hotel. Watching their retreating backs while at the same time trying to catch a glimpse of Joshua Flagg and Horace Tripp—both lost now in a crowd of pushing men and woman—I stepped into an aisle and found myself face-to-face with Anna Hauptmann as she was being escorted out by defense attorney Lloyd Fisher.
We stopped, the two of us, inches apart, the sleeve of my dress brushing against her forearm.
“I’m so sorry,” I burst out.
But in that instant, leaning forward, the woman caught my eye. Doubtless startled by the penitent look on my face, she offered me a melancholic smile, so fleeting it might not even have been there. But she also mumbled words that sounded like ja ja ja, adding, “It is all right” in a soft German-accented voice.
I stood there, paralyzed, as the attorney pushed at her elbow, and she disappeared past me.
From behind Aleck shoved. “For God’s sake, Edna, I thought you were going to embrace her.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “A horrible moment, Aleck, the sadness in that face.”
He rolled his eyes. “Really, Edna. A murderer’s wife.”
Walter Winchell stood a few feet away, removing the dark glasses he wore in court. Why? I’d wondered. The sunshine of fame too penetrating? Now, arms crossed, he glared at me as though I’d committed some foul act in his presence. His shoulders bunched up, he swung around and said something into the ear of Colonel Lindbergh’s friend, Henry Breckinridge. Both men then swung back to stare at me.
