Stolen Away

“I was always interested,” she said, with a little laugh. “I think I paid for the right to remain interested, don’t you? And I think I have the right to be concerned when someone else is being wronged in this convoluted affair. And the way Mr. Hauptmann is being wronged makes the injustice done me pale in comparison.”

“Your concern for Hauptmann is admirable,” I granted her. “But the possibility remains that he was, in some way or manner, involved in at least the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion caper. He was convincing tonight, but many a guilty man is, where his innocence is concerned.”

“I’m concerned about more than just Hauptmann’s innocence,” she said. Her eyes glittered over her cocktail glass. “I have my doubts about that little skeleton they found in the woods.”

“Well,” I admitted, “after that photo Hoffman showed me, I can see why.”

“Nate, thousands upon thousands of people had combed those woods near the very spot the little body was found. Hell, even the brush underneath the body was trampled.”

“Underneath?”

“Only a few feet away, telephone workmen had put up a pole, laying wires, because of the need for extra communcations in those frenzied early days.” Her archness was offset by her sincerity. “Those tiny bones, who’s- ever they were, must have been placed there, long after the fact.”

“Slim’s identification of the body was pretty hasty,” I allowed.

She studied her drink, then made a confession: “Well, there was one other person who made an identification.”

That was the first I’d heard of that. “Who in hell?”

“Betty Gow,” she said. “The nurse. She viewed the little body, too, and identified it as Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”

“Based on what? There was nothing to identify. I saw the photo…”

“There was a tiny garment under the bones. Betty Gow claimed to recognize it as a little shirt made by her, the night of the kidnapping, to wrap the child in because he had a cold. She claimed she knew it from the thread, the distinctive blue thread she’d used.”

“I see. Still sounds a little thin. But that is the most convincing case for those bones being the real child.”

“Yes—but couldn’t that garment have been planted, as well?”

“I suppose…now we’re getting a little overmelodramatic, aren’t we, Evalyn?”

“Are we? Haven’t you always thought someone on the ‘inside,’ with either the Lindbergh or Morrow family staff, was somehow in on the crime?”

“Yes. So, what? You’re saying Betty Gow might have lied, or helped plant that little shirt…”

“Not necessarily. The cloth and the thread were provided to Betty Gow, the night of the kidnapping, by the butler’s wife—Elsie Whately.”

The Hauptmann apartment took up the second floor of the house, a mostly empty five rooms for which Evalyn had been paying, since December, fifty dollars a month to the seventy-year-old widow who lived below.

As I wandered the empty rooms I remembered reading of the new, rather expensive furniture the Hauptmanns owned, which had seemed so suspicious to the cops and prosecutors. A walnut bedroom suite, an ivory crib, a floor-model radio in a nice walnut veneer cabinet—all gone, sold to help pay for the defense effort. Now there was nothing in this apartment but the bare floors, faded wallpaper and our echoing footsteps.

“As many people as have been through here,” I said, “I don’t know what I expected to find.”

Evalyn had been following me like a dutiful puppy through the small living room, the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the bath. “It doesn’t seem to me,” she said, “that the Hauptmanns were living in the lap of luxury.”

“It doesn’t even seem that way to me,” I said, “although this is about right for a man operating a little contracting business…dabbling in the stock market in a minor, amateur way…his wife working full-time as a waitress in a bakery. About right. Let’s look in those famous closets, shall we?”

In what had been the nursery, I found the closet where the wainscoting had been removed to show the jury the “evidence” of Jafsie’s phone number having been written there. Last night I’d told Evalyn what I had heard about the reporter on the Daily News named Tim O’Neil who’d reputedly created this evidence for a headline. She’d been suitably outraged, and wondered if we shouldn’t “look this fellow up.” I said we should.

In the ceiling of what had apparently been a linen closet, off the hall, was the access panel to the attic.

“I’d better make this trip by myself,” I advised Evalyn, who had one look inside and agreed. I handed her my suit coat.

To get to the attic hatch, I had to take the shelves down, stack them out in the hall, and scale the shelving cleats like some half-ass mountain-climber.

“Careful!” she said.

“Hauptmann must’ve needed that one scrap of lumber pretty goddamn bad,” I said, breathing hard, plastered to the closet wall like a bug, “to go looking for it up here.”

Balancing awkwardly, clutching a cleat with one hand, I pushed the trapdoor-like panel up with the other, then hoisted myself up through the tiny opening—perhaps fifteen inches square. The attic was a dark, musty, dusty inverted V that would make a midget claustrophobic.

I hung my head down the hatch where an eager-eyed Evalyn looked up from the linen closet. “See if the landlady has a flashlight,” I said.

“There’s one in the car.”

“Get it.”