I sipped my Bacardi. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
35
Mount Holly, New Jersey, was a sleepy little village at the base of the holly-covered hill from which it took its name. Despite some modern stores, the effect was of a place where time had frozen toward the middle of the previous century; along the broad, tree-lined streets were the simple square two-and three-story brick homes erected by the village’s early Quaker residents—solid-wood shutters and wrought-iron fences and rails. On this cheerless, chill March afternoon, the smell of smoke from old-fashioned wood-burning stoves singed the air.
I parked the Packard on Main Street right in front of the old courthouse where Ellis Parker had kept his office for over forty years. The courthouse was a two-story yellow-brick structure with green shutters, white trim and a stately bell tower—wearing the date it was built like a badge: 1796. Moving across a patterned brick sidewalk over a small flat lawn to the front door—a vast oak slab with a colonial lantern nearby and the coat of arms of New Jersey in granite just above it—I felt I’d taken a left turn into another era.
Parker was in the second-floor rear office, in back of a bustling reception area where his deputies and his secretary had desks. The secretary, a dark-haired, bespectacled matronly woman, ushered me into Parker’s presence.
The Old Fox, sitting in a swivel chair at a cluttered desk, was in shirtsleeves and suspenders, a food-flecked tie loose around his unbuttoned collar. He was as I remembered him: paunchy, bald, what little remained of his hair white, his mustache and eyebrows salt-and-pepper. His eyes were wide-set and drowsy. He was puffing a corncob pipe and looked like a farmer halfheartedly dressed for church.
The office was as quaint as a Currier and Ives print, only not near as cute: the desk littered with correspondence, reports, case histories and memos; a windowsill precariously balancing numerous telephones and directories; baskets and boxes in corners teeming with books, trial-exhibit photographs and maps; bulletin boards papered with police-department circulars, some boldly inscribed “Captured” and “Convicted” in black grease pencil; and sitting in one corner, on a chair, wearing a hat, a human skeleton.
“The Chicago man,” he said, smiling with the natural condescension of the rural for the urban. “Have a seat, young fella.”
I pulled up a hardwood chair. “I’m surprised you remembered me,” I said, as we shook hands.
He snorted, holding onto the corncob pipe with his other hand; the tobacco smelled like damp leaves burning. “Couldn’t forget the feller who ran interference for me—got me in to see Colonel Lindbergh, when that son of a bitch Schwarzkopf was set on keeping me out.”
“As I recall,” I said, “getting in to see Lindbergh didn’t do you much good.”
He shook his head, no. “He’d been poisoned against me. Politics. It’s all politics.” He smiled privately. “But he’ll listen to me now.”
“It’ll have to be by wireless,” I said. “He lives in England these days, you know.”
“He’ll come back for this,” Parker said confidently. “It’s gonna be a whole new ball game, when this hits the fan.”
“What is ‘this’?”
He ignored the question. “You said on the phone you’re working for the Governor.”
I nodded. “You realize, of course, that Governor Hoffman is concerned about this investigation of yours.”
“And here I thought I had his blessing.”
“You’ve got his blessing, as I understand it, but he’d like to know what the hell you’re up to. Time is running out for Richard Hauptmann.”
The smile disappeared from around the corncob pipe. “That poor unfortunate son of a bitch. Sitting in the death house waiting to be executed for a crime he’s completely innocent of.”
“I think he’s innocent myself,” I said. “Why do you feel that way?”
“Nathan…mind if I call you Nathan? Nathan, you’re the kidnapper of this baby, you’re the master criminal of this century, you plan the crime of the century and you execute it. If you’re such a genius do you take a piece of wood from your own attic to make a ladder and then leave it behind as a clue?”
“Probably not.”
“Never. Especially not if you’re Hauptmann, who has all kinds of lumber in his garage and his yard. That was contrived evidence, I know that from my friends in the State Police. It’s bullshit.”
“Well, you’re right.”
“Let me ask you something, Nathan. If you had the brains to collect this ransom, would you go to a gas station with your own car, your own face, your own license plate, and give the guy a gold note and add insult to injury and tell him you got more like it at home?”
“I guess not.” I shifted in the hard chair. “No offense, Ellis—you don’t mind if I call you Ellis? Ellis, this is all old news to me. I didn’t drive up here from Washington, D.C., to sit around the pickle barrel and chew the fat.”
His mouth twitched around the pipe. “Do you know that that little corpse found on that mountainside probably wasn’t the Lindbergh baby?”
“I suspect it.”
He sat forward and his jaw jutted like the prow of a ship. “Yes, but do you
“Weather records?”
He leaned back, smiling like a fisherman who’d just made a big, easy catch. “Ever build a compost heap, Nathan?”
