Stolen Away

“Or maybe Violet Sharpe, or Ollie Whately? Maybe all four of you sat at the same seance table, one night. By the way, the Marinellis wouldn’t happen to have been students of yours, would they?”

The door slammed in my face.

“Yeah, Jafsie,” I said, “you can still handle yourself,” and joined Evalyn in the car.

33

Ghent was a tree-shaded residential section of Norfolk, just off the downtown, its narrow brick streets lined with old two-and three-story brick houses, some shoulder-to-shoulder and hugging the sidewalk, others with shamrock-green lawns moist from sheltering boxwood, magnolia and winter-barren crape myrtle. Piercing Ghent was the Hague, a small horseshoe-shaped body of water where skiffs and pleasure craft were moored. Nothing larger could navigate the pondlike harbor. Presumably it connected to the nearby Elizabeth River, but from the rubbery dock where Evalyn and I stood, you couldn’t tell; the funnels and masts of the busy bay were obscured by a bastion of riverfront buildings. The day was cool, the sky overcast, the water, indeed the world, a peaceful but chill gray-blue.

The sign on the central of several white-frame, green-roofed shambling dockside structures said “J. H. Curtis Boat and Engine Corporation.” Not a small operation, but not a large one, either—an obvious step down from the owner’s previous shipbuilding company, which had had among its many customers the German government. It was in that central building, in a modest, glassed-in office (no secretary, no receptionist) looking out on a big cement work area where several boatmen were sanding down the hull of a small racing craft, that we met with Commodore John H. Curtis.

“Mrs. McLean,” Curtis said, standing from a swivel chair at an obsessively neat rolltop desk, grasping the hand she’d extended, “it’s a great pleasure to meet you at last.”

“Thank you, Commodore,” she said. Evalyn wore another black frock, this one trimmed in white and gray, with a white-and-gray pillbox hat; she looked neat enough for a department-store window. “You’re looking well.”

“I feel well,” he said, with a nod of his large head, “all things considered.” And he looked pretty good at that: tall, tanned, rather stout; in his light-brown business suit, his brown-and-yellow tie, he could have stood next to Evalyn in that department-store window. Only the lines around his eyes gave away the stress.

“Thank you for seeing us at such short notice,” I said, and shook hands with the Commodore. He’d put two wood chairs with cushioned seats out, in anticipation of our arrival, and he gestured to them, and we sat, and so did he.

“We seem to have mutual interests, Mr. Heller,” he said, with a friendly but serious smile. Looking at Evalyn, he said, “I feel we have much in common, Mrs. McLean.”

“I believe we do, Commodore,” she said. “I feel we both suffered a certain public…humiliation…as a result of our sincere desire to do good in the Lindbergh tragedy.”

“I’ve been fortunate,” he said, swaying a bit in the swivel chair, “having my family stand behind me. My wife… well, without her, perhaps I would have been lost. But my business is going well, and my personal reputation, here in the Norfolk area, and in the shipping trade in general, remains untarnished.”

“I would assume that means, Commodore,” I said, “that you’d like to put this mess behind you, and get on with your life.”

“I’m getting on with my life quite nicely,” he said, sitting forward, his lips tightening, “but I don’t intend to allow the indignities done to me to stand unredressed.”

“You were accused of being a hoaxer, at first,” I said, “but were tried and convicted for obstructing justice—the state arguing that you aided and abetted the kidnap gang.”

“Yes,” Curtis said, with a mirthless smirk, “by failing to give ‘accurate information’ about them to the authorities.”

“So the State of New Jersey,” Evalyn said, eyes narrowing, “acknowledged that you were in fact in touch with the kidnappers.”

Curtis nodded. “The language of the court was ‘the actual kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby numbering seven or eight, and including a member of the Lindbergh household.’”

Early on, the position of Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch and others was that Violet Sharpe’s suicide was an admission of guilt; by the time of Hauptmann’s trial, that stance had been conveniently forgotten.

“It seems to me,” Evalyn said, her gloved hands folded in her lap, “that if the Hauptmann conviction was correct, your conviction should be set aside, Mr. Curtis…and your record cleared, and the fine you paid refunded.”

“And if your conviction was correct,” I said to Curtis, “then Hauptmann’s conviction should be set aside, and he should he a free man again.”

“You might think that,” Curtis said, with a wry, world-weary smile. “It was the same courtroom, one of the same prosecutors…. Did you know that I offered to testify against Hauptmann?”

“I’d heard that,” I said. God, was I glad he brought it up. “That’s one of the things I hoped to ask you about.”

The intermittent whine of a power drill in the outer work-area provided an uncomfortable edge to the conversation.

“I told them I thought I could positively identify Hauptman as the ‘John’ I dealt with,” he said, blandly. “There’d been much speculation that ‘Cemetery John’ and the rumrunner John I encountered might be one and the same.”

“Did you recognize Hauptmann?” I asked. “Was he your ‘John’?”

“From newspaper pictures and newsreels I’d seen,” Curtis said, “he could have been. I told Wilentz and crew that I would testify against Hauptmann in exchange for full exoneration and the return of the thousand-dollar fine. Schwarzkopf thought it was a swell idea, and couldn’t have cared less if I was telling the truth or not. But Wilentz was afraid to put me on the stand.”

“Why?” Evalyn asked.

“Because my story, the story I’d been telling all along, which was true, did not fit the