36
Ellis Parker was my passenger as, at his direction, I guided the Packard sixteen peacefully rural miles to the New Lisbon Colony, a state hospital for the insane. I seemed to be making a habit of dropping in at nuthouses; but nothing could have prepared me for the insanity of what I heard along the way.
The Cornfield Sherlock, wearing a bulky brown topcoat and a formless gray fedora, had left his corncob pipe behind. Settling himself in the passenger seat, he began the journey by using a pocketknife to cut the tip off a cigar. He fired up the stogie, and cracked a window; ventilation or not, the smell made me long for the corncob.
“Got an extry, if you want, Nathan,” he said, gesturing with the cigar, embers flying. I brushed them from Evalyn’s upholstery.
“No thanks. Care to tell me why your suspect is in custody at a madhouse?”
“I didn’t say he was in custody. I said we had him under wraps. You could call it a kind of protective custody.”
“You don’t have enough to arrest him formally, yet?”
“We need a confession,” Parker allowed. “Of course, we’ve got several from him already-just not quite the right one yet.”
“He’s confessed? More than once?”
“Keep your eye on the road, son. You don’t know this country.” He blew a formidable smoke ring; it wreathed his head-he smiled, like a partly shaven, not entirely benign Santa Claus. “Early this year, I sent some deputies of mine to New York to keep an eye on Wendel. He was living in the Stanford Hotel at the time. They took a room at the Martinique next door, watched his movements with binoculars and so on. My son Ellis, Jr., was in charge.”
“I didn’t know your son was in your line of work.”
“Well, he is, and I’m damn proud of him. I needed him there to ramrod the group. Those other deputies weren’t professional lawmen by any means. They were just…contacts of mine.”
“Contacts?”
He shrugged. “I’ve got my network of snitches and such in New Jersey and New York alike.”
That probably meant they were gamblers and minor-league hustlers. Nice class of “deputy.”
“How did the surveillance pan out?” I asked.
“Not well. By the middle of February, with time running out for Bruno Hauptmann, I figured we should move.”
“Move?”
He nodded, eyes narrowed, jaw jutting, cigar clamped in one corner of his mouth. “I got Ellis, Jr., outa there, ’cause Wendel would recognize him, and the other three waited till Wendel was coming out of the hotel, told him they were cops, put a gun in his ribs and drove him to Brooklyn.”
I about hit the brakes. “That’s kidnapping, Ellis.”
“Horseshit, son. Didn’t you ever break a rule to crack a case? Didn’t you ever bust a window to go in and pick up a clue? Anyway, the fellas took Wendel to a house belonging to one of their fathers; all arranged in advance. They kept him in the basement, blindfolded at first.”
“For how long?” I managed.
“Eight days,” he said, shrugging.
I didn’t know what to say. I could barely keep my eyes focused on the road. Parker just sat puffing his cigar, telling his story, proud of himself.
“I told my deputies, you tell Wendel you’re not really cops, what you are is mobsters. Tell him because of what he did-kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, which from inside sources you know that he done-he’s made things hot for the ‘Boys.’ I said, tell him the police know Hauptmann didn’t do it and they won’t get off the Boys’ backs till they find the men who did.”
“Your deputies,” I said softly, “pretended to be gangsters, holding him hostage?”
Parker nodded, smiling. “They used Italian names, and acted tough, threatened to put him in cement and dump him in the river.”
“Did they beat him?”
“Hell no! What do you think I am, Nathan? A damn torturer? My deputies let him take baths, fed him, even gave him a cot to sleep on, and a radio so’s he could listen to music.”
“They tie him up?”
“No, sir. Somebody was guarding him all the time; he was down in the basement, with the windows boarded up. He wasn’t going nowhere. Somebody was always listening, waiting for him to break down.”
“How were they going to do that, Ellis, without feeding him the goldfish?”
He snorted a laugh. “My deputies wondered the same thing. They said, Ellis, this man is sitting there and he’s eating and sleeping, he’s listening to music, he bathes every day and he shaves, but he doesn’t tell us anything. And I said, don’t worry-one day, when you least expect it, this man will break down and tell you the whole story. For one thing, this man is dying to tell the story to somebody, and I figured he would tell them because he took ’em to be criminals and he’d want them to know how he was this master criminal who did this big crime.”
“That’s one thing,” I said. “What’s the other?”
“Wendel’s a drinking man,” Ellis said, with a little shrug. “I had ’em make it clear to Wendel that the only way he could get a drink was by way of giving a full confession.”
“Jesus, Ellis,” I said, finally betraying my feelings. “A confession a drunk gives in exchange for a drink isn’t worth the empty glass. And keeping a guy in a dark cellar for eight days makes the rubber-hose treatment seem like kid gloves.”
Parker’s smile had disappeared. He looked at me hard. “We don’t have time for social niceties in this case, Nathan. The New York cops beat up Hauptmann, didn’t they? That bastard Welch third-degreed Violet Sharpe into a bottle of poison. That fella Curtis from Norfolk got the crap kicked out of him. If that’s the rules of the game, and we want to play the game, maybe even
I shook my head. “Can’t argue with logic like that.”
“Anyway, Wendel did break down, on the sixth day,” Parker said, defensively. “Bawled like a baby and tells his story from beginning to end.”
“What exactly was in his confession?”
“How he made those three interlocking ladders himself with wood he took from a church being constructed in Trenton. Put stockings over his shoes and a laundry bag around his neck, and gloves on his hands. When he went up the ladder, he broke a rung, big fella that he was, and knew he couldn’t come back down with the baby around his neck like he planned. The baby was fast asleep in its crib and he rubbed paregoric on the baby’s lips to keep it sleeping. Then he put it in the laundry bag, sneaked downstairs and out the front door.”
“No inside help? What about Violet Sharpe, or Whately the butler?”
“Didn’t mention ’em. I think the Sharpe girl was involved, myself, but so far he hasn’t said so. Anyway, he took the child to his house in Trenton where his wife and two children helped care for the kid. But he says a week later, the kid fell out of its crib and fractured its skull. So he took the baby back and buried it in the woods just a few miles from its home.”
“That’s it? That’s the confession?”
“Well, it’s far more detailed, of course.”
“It’s bullshit, Ellis!”
“Eyes on the road, son.”
“Eyes on the road, my ass. Wendel’s done everything he can to conform to the state’s ridiculous lone-wolf theory-which the state never believed in, in the first place. And what about your own theory that that kid in the woods wasn’t Baby Lindbergh?”
“I know,” Parker admitted, “I know. That’s why we’re working to get a better confession.”
“Oh, Jesus. Ellis, you’ve outsmarted yourself. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, Wendel really is guilty. Really did mastermind the kidnapping, and either sold Capone on the idea, or was put up to it, by Capone. Wendel had to think your deputies were mobsters looking for a fall guy to make a phony confession! A fall guy willing to go along with the scam, to keep himself out of cement overshoes.”
