of fame: white wood-frame cottages with green shutters behind neat wooden fences, modest yards blanketed white, shade trees grayly skeletal, gaily decorated with ice; a modest downtown where the flat rooftops of two-and three-story brick buildings wore white mantles. In the streets, however, the snow had turned black and slushy, and on the sidewalks was hard-packed under thousands of imported trampling feet.
Breckinridge dropped me off, as his car crawled along Main Street, leaving me while he went off to some distant designated parking area. I waded through the humanity (make that “humanity”) where gawkers mingled with souvenir salesmen on the courthouse steps. Some pretty classy merchandise was being hawked—miniature kidnap ladders, ten cents each, in several sizes (one nifty little number you could pin on your shirt or lapel), autographed photos of Charles and Anne Lindbergh with shaky, suspicious signatures and little bagged clumps of the late baby’s hair, sold by a salesman who seemed to be prematurely balding in odd, patchy ways.
Newsreel cameramen, perched with their spidery contraptions atop cars, were churning at me; reporters attacked me like bees, some with notepads, others with microphones, asking me if I was anybody. I told them I wasn’t and pressed my way inside. I showed my color-coded pass to one of several New Jersey troopers at the door, hung up my topcoat and took my hat with me up the winding stairs. I came into a big, square, high-ceilinged courtroom, with pale yellow walls and a lot of humidity-misted windows; at right was the jury box, an American flag pinned to the wall behind it, and between the judge’s bench and the jury was a simple wooden chair for witnesses. Behind the judge’s bench, high up, beneath Grecian trim, was the county seal, depicting a stalk of golden corn.
Right now this spartan chamber was as noisy as a stadium before the big game. Hundreds of spectators were seated in churchlike pews and several hundred more were squeezed in on folding chairs, while the rear balcony was crammed with reporters, perhaps a hundred and fifty of the fifth estate’s finest, working at cramped, makeshift pine-board writing desks.
Among the spectators were celebrities: Clifton Webb, Jack Benny, Lynn Fontanne, and fat, effete Alexander Woollcott, who seemed svelte compared to rumpled, mustached Elsa Maxwell, that pear-shaped matron of cafe society, leading a pack of ladies in mink, bringing to mind that the mink is a member of the weasel family and that the female of that species is particularly bloodthirsty.
The crowded press box included familiar names and faces, as well: Walter Winchell, who in his syndicated column had long ago pronounced Hauptmann guilty; novelist Fannie Hurst; columnist Arthur Brisbane, who had given Capone so much publicity in the early days of the case; Damon Runyon; Adela Rogers St. Johns; and on and on….
I took all this in as another New Jersey State cop, acting as an usher, led me to a seat behind the prosecution’s bench; a small piece of paper was taped to the empty folding chair, saying HELLER. Next to my folding chair, in another, sat Slim Lindbergh. His baby face had aged, but he still looked boyish; he was dressed in a neat gray three-piece suit—without a ladder pinned to the lapel.
I nodded to him and smiled a little and he returned the nod and the smile; he didn’t stand, but as I sat, he offered a hand, which I shook.
“Good to see you again, Nate,” he said, over the din. “Sorry I’ve been such a stranger.”
“Hi, Slim. Why are you putting yourself through this? You’ve testified.”
“I have to be here,” he said solemnly.
He nodded toward the prosecution’s table; whether by that he meant they’d requested his presence, I couldn’t say.
David Wilentz, the Attorney General, who had decided to try this case himself—because of political aspirations, the cynical said, myself among them—turned to greet me with a Cheshire-cat smile and an outstretched hand. His grip was fist-firm and his dark, smart eyes locked onto me the same way.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, “thank you for coming. Sorry we haven’t had a chance to talk.”
“Glad to help,” I said, as he released my hand.
He was a small, dark, thin-faced man with a long, thin, sharp nose and glossy, slicked-back black hair; about forty, he looked a little like George Raft, only more intelligent and shiftier. He wore a dark-blue business suit, expensively tailored, with a slash of silk handkerchief in the breast pocket. This was a guy who would never go hungry.
“Just stick to the facts,” he said. “Don’t offer anything.”
I nodded. I’d spoken on the telephone, long-distance, to a prosecutor named Hauck, so they knew what to expect. Wilentz turned his back to me and began whispering among his fellow prosecutors.
From my seat I could see the defense table pretty well, and the person who commanded the most attention was the chief defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. Decked out in a black cutaway coat with a white carnation in its buttonhole, gray striped trousers and spats, the massive, fleshy attorney cut an unintentionally comic figure; in his mind he was Adolphe Menjou, but in reality he was W. C. Fields, right down to the thinning sandy hair and alcohol- ruddy complexion. His round, thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses gave him a further vaudeville touch.
In the papers, Reilly was reported as having two nicknames: the “Bull of Brooklyn,” in reference to his younger days, when he was one of New York’s most successful trial attorneys; and, more recently, “Death House” Reilly, because that was where clients of his charged with murder had been consistently ending up lately. Fifty-two (looking twenty years older), Reilly was well past his prime, and I wondered how the defendant got stuck with him.
Directly behind Reilly sat his client. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was surprisingly nondescript, a skinny, wide- shouldered man in a gray-brown suit that looked big for him. His eyes were light blue, and blank; he seemed to rarely blink, rarely to move, sitting erect and staring, not so much morose as indifferent. His hair was blond, his cheekbones high and wide, his cheeks sunken, his face an oval, his features rather handsome, and decidedly Teutonic.
The other defense lawyers (and it was only later that I learned their names) included stocky young C. Lloyd Fisher, who had (unsuccessfully) defended Commodore Curtis in this very courtroom; bespectacled, shrimpy Frederick Pope; and beak-nosed, slouchy Egbert Rosecrans. Dapper Prosecutor Wilentz and his businesslike associates were a sharper-looking bunch by far.
Bells echoing in the tower above rang the hour—ten o’clock—and the white-haired court crier announced, “Oyez, oyez, oyez! All manner of persons having business with this court on this eighth day of January in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-five, let them draw nigh, give their attention and be heard.”
The judge—Justice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard—emerged from a door behind his dais, black robes flowing; his dark hair gone mostly white, his small mustache too, he had a dignified but just vaguely unkempt demeanor, like a
