“That’s right. We’re old school pals, Dave and me. You met him, didn’t you?”
“Briefly. I saw him in action at the trial. I was only there one day, but it was an eyeful. Slick operator.”
He nodded, reaching for a humidor on his desk. “He is, at that. Care for a cigar?”
“No thanks.”
He lit his up; a big fine fat Havana. “Funny thing is, Dave is anti-capital punishment. Me, I have no compunction about showing a murderer the door to hell.”
Yes, I was back in the Lindbergh Case, aboard the Melodrama Express.
“Why,” I asked, “does the State of New Jersey need private investigators?”
“I’m surprised you’d ask that, Mr. Heller, considering that once upon a time you had considerable contact with our State Police, specifically Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.”
I shrugged, nodded.
He narrowed his eyes, staring at me forcefully. “You see, I went to the death house, Mr. Heller, to see Bruno Richard Hauptmann…I’d heard he wished an ‘audience’ with me, and, rather on the sly, I granted him one, thinking, I admit, that I might hear a confession. Instead, I heard a quietly indignant man, a man of considerable dignity and intelligence, who raised a good number of questions that I had to agree needed answering.”
“Ah,” I said, smiling, suddenly making a connection. “So you went to the head of the State Police to find out the answers to those questions.”
“Precisely. And our mutual friend Colonel Schwarzkopf ignored my executive order to reopen the investigation, sending me monthly, token notes to the effect that there were no new developments. When I granted Hauptmann the thirty-day reprieve, I began hiring my own investigators, and essentially ‘fired’ Schwarzkopf from the Lindbergh case. There is, as you might imagine, no love lost between us.”
“Was Hauptmann himself the reason you got involved in this?” I asked, knowing the governor had been accused of playing politics. “Was he that convincing a jailhouse lawyer?”
“He was convincing, all right. But there were other factors. I believe you’ve met New Jersey’s answer to Sherlock Holmes—Ellis Parker?”
I nodded. “At Lindbergh’s estate, in the early days.”
“Parker’s been conducting his own investigation,” Hoffman said, “although I haven’t been privy to any results as yet. He’s one of the people I want you to look up, in fact; he’s playing his cards a little too close to his vest, for my money.”
“The old boy’s a showboat,” I said. “But don’t be fooled by the hick veneer.”
“Oh, I’m not. And I take his opinion quite seriously. He thinks Hauptmann is innocent, or at least no more than a minor figure, who is taking the fall for the real kidnappers.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion group may never have had the child?”
He nodded vigorously, exhaling smoke, gesturing with the cigar. “Yes, and consider this, Mr. Heller—Ellis Parker insists that the baby found in that shallow grave in the Sourlands woods was
“Well, I understand Slim Lindbergh’s identification of the body was pretty perfunctory.”
“Perfunctory! Are you aware that the body was examined, in the morgue, by…let me find it.” He shuffled through some of the many documents and folders on his desk; quickly centered on the correct one and read, with rather a triumphant flourish, “The child’s own pediatrician, Dr. Phillip Van Ingen, examined the remains. The undertaker reported Dr. Van Ingen as saying, and this is a quote: ‘If you were to lay ten million dollars on a table and tell me it was mine, if I could say positively that this was the Colonel’s son, I couldn’t honestly identify this skeleton.’”
“Skeleton? I knew the body was decayed, but I understood the facial features were intact….”
“Haven’t you ever
I shook my head, no.
He plucked a glossy photo from a folder. “They couldn’t even verify the sex,” he said, and handed the photo to me.
“Jesus,” I said.
It was just a tiny black pile of bones; you could make out a skull, more or less, and a rib or two; the left leg was missing.
My mouth felt suddenly dry. “I heard that the child was identified by its toes overlapping in some distinctive way…”
“Well, there’s only one foot there to check at all,” Hoffman said. “But Dr. Van Ingen’s examination of the child, on February eighteenth, ten days before the kidnapping, reported both its little toes were turned in, overlapping the next toe. The corpse, what there was of it, had overlapping toes as well—but it was the
“It’s hard to tell even that,” 1 said, and handed the damn photo back to him.
“One fact is indisputable—the physician at the mortuary measured the body and found it to be thirty-three and one-third inches long. Van Ingen’s measurement on February eighteenth was twenty-nine inches.”
“Some of that could be attributed to growth of bones after death,” I said, thinking it through. “But hell—not four and a half inches…”
“Of course this all points up one of the major blunders of the trial,” Hoffman said.
