was the chief defense attorney, Edward J. Reilly. Decked out in a black cutaway coat with a white carnation in its buttonhole, gray striped trousers and spats, the massive, fleshy attorney cut an unintentionally comic figure; in his mind he was Adolphe Menjou, but in reality he was W. C. Fields, right down to the thinning sandy hair and alcohol- ruddy complexion. His round, thick-lensed, black-rimmed glasses gave him a further vaudeville touch.
In the papers, Reilly was reported as having two nicknames: the “Bull of Brooklyn,” in reference to his younger days, when he was one of New York’s most successful trial attorneys; and, more recently, “Death House” Reilly, because that was where clients of his charged with murder had been consistently ending up lately. Fifty-two (looking twenty years older), Reilly was well past his prime, and I wondered how the defendant got stuck with him.
Directly behind Reilly sat his client. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was surprisingly nondescript, a skinny, wide- shouldered man in a gray-brown suit that looked big for him. His eyes were light blue, and blank; he seemed to rarely blink, rarely to move, sitting erect and staring, not so much morose as indifferent. His hair was blond, his cheekbones high and wide, his cheeks sunken, his face an oval, his features rather handsome, and decidedly Teutonic.
The other defense lawyers (and it was only later that I learned their names) included stocky young C. Lloyd Fisher, who had (unsuccessfully) defended Commodore Curtis in this very courtroom; bespectacled, shrimpy Frederick Pope; and beak-nosed, slouchy Egbert Rosecrans. Dapper Prosecutor Wilentz and his businesslike associates were a sharper-looking bunch by far.
Bells echoing in the tower above rang the hour-ten o’clock-and the white-haired court crier announced, “Oyez, oyez, oyez! All manner of persons having business with this court on this eighth day of January in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Thirty-five, let them draw nigh, give their attention and be heard.”
The judge-Justice Thomas Whitaker Trenchard-emerged from a door behind his dais, black robes flowing; his dark hair gone mostly white, his small mustache too, he had a dignified but just vaguely unkempt demeanor, like a harried country doctor.
Soon a parade of witnesses began, police witnesses initially, and it wasn’t particularly riveting stuff. Elsa Maxwell and her minks chatted amongst themselves, and occasionally the judge would sternly remind the courtroom to mind its manners.
Wilentz was smooth as a polished stone, but Reilly-who was trying to make the New Jersey police look like buffoons, which shouldn’t have been that tough-was a ham actor, bouncing his voice off the rafters.
The red-flannel-faced defender did score a few points: he got a fingerprint man to admit never having even heard of the Bertillon system, and got across the ludicrously shoddy police work of the initial investigation by getting two cops to say each thought the
Then Wilentz got away from the police witnesses and put a frail, bearded, eighty-seven-year-old codger named Amandus Hochmuth on the stand. Hochmuth, who lived on the corner of Mercer County Highway and Featherbed Lane, claimed he’d seen Hauptmann driving a “dirty green” car on the morning of March 1, 1932. He remembered this because Hauptmann had “glared” at him.
“And the man you saw looking out of that automobile, glaring at you,” Wilentz said, “is he in this room?”
“Yes!”
“Where is he?”
“Alongside that trooper there,” Hochmuth said, and as he pointed a wavering finger at Hauptmann, the courtroom lights went out.
“It’s the Lord’s wrath over a lying witness!” Reilly shouted in the near-darkness.
The courtroom exploded in laughter. Slim didn’t smile next to me, and I didn’t either, because Reilly’s style bored me; and Judge Trenchard rapped his gavel and threatened the gallery again.
The lights came up within a couple minutes, and Wilentz directed Hochmuth to step down and identify the man he’d seen, and, slow, wobbly, the witness did so, pointing a trembling finger at Hauptmann, and then actually placing a hand on Hauptmann’s knee, fearfully, as if he might get burned.
The defendant shook his head three times and with a bitter smile said to the woman behind him (his wife Anna, I wondered?): “
Next to me, Slim said softly, “What was that?”
I whispered back: “He said, ‘The old man is crazy.’”
Then florid defender Reilly had a crack at the old man, and did get him to confess his eyes weren’t perfect, but otherwise couldn’t budge the old boy.
Next came several witnesses, including a Forest Service technologist, who Wilentz attempted to use to introduce evidence about the kidnap ladder. But Reilly and his associate Pope managed to block it; the ladder had been “altered” and passed between various “hands of people not identified by the prosecution.”
Following this came a familiar face, though I confess I didn’t recognize him at first. The ferret-faced cab driver, Perrone, who had delivered the envelope to Jafsie’s house the night of the first cemetery rendezvous, made an eyewitness ID of Hauptmann as the man who gave him the envelope. He got off the stand and placed a hand on Hauptmann’s shoulder and said, “This is the man.”
Hauptmann curled a lip and said, “You’re a liar.”
Reilly went after Perrone with a sledgehammer. He bullied the cab driver about being on relief; tested his memory about other passengers he’d had the same night; implied he’d been bought and coached by the prosecution. The tactic backfired: the courtroom hated Reilly by the time the badgering was over.
Then it was my turn. I was questioned by Wilentz about driving Condon to Woodlawn Cemetery for the first of the two “Cemetery John” encounters. I told of what I’d seen, which included the guy jumping off the cemetery gate and running into Van Cortlandt Park, Condon following him to a bench by the shack where they sat and talked. Told all of it.
Almost all of it. There was one question, a rather key question, I wasn’t asked by the slick Wilentz.
“Buy you lunch, Nate?” Slim asked, and I said sure, as we exited the courtroom for the noon break; we both had to damn near shout, because the courtroom was still buzzing.
“Union Hotel dining room okay?” Lindy asked, breath smoking in the chill air, as we pushed through a crowd that was cheering and clapping at the sight of the Lone Eagle; newsreel cameras churned and reporters called out questions-none of it registering on Slim, who carried around with him his own quiet at the center of the storm.
“Hotel dining room’s swell,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Right there,” he said, nodding across the way. “That’s where you’re staying.”
We moved through the car-choked street; onlookers called out to Lindy who at times bestowed them a tight glazed smile, and very occasionally a nod. He seemed oblivious to the grisly goods being hawked, the little ladders and such; but he couldn’t have been.
The Union Hotel was a lumbering red-brick affair with ugly gingerbread work detailing a sprawling porch over which lurked double-deck balconies. Out front a chalk sandwich board listed the fare in the dining room: Lamp Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, Lindbergh Sundaes, among others.
The dining room was bustling, but a few tables were reserved for celebrities like Slim and the prosecution and defense teams. Colonel Breckinridge, who hadn’t made it into the courtroom, was waiting for us at an isolated table off to one side.
As we sat down, Breckinridge asked Lindbergh how the trial was going today, and he said, “Fine.”
I said, “Reilly strikes me as the prosecution’s biggest asset.”
“How so?” Breckinridge asked.
“Well, that swallowtail coat and spats getup isn’t exactly endearing him to that down-home jury. Or his loud, bullying style. He’s about as subtle as John Barrymore half-in-the-bag.”
A waiter handed us menus and Lindbergh examined his with unblinking eyes, his expression not unlike the one the defendant had been wearing in court.
The middle-aged, potbellied waiter, though busy, stood attentively by while we read the menu and ordered at leisure; Lindbergh wasn’t just any customer, after all.
“What are the ‘Hauptmann Fries’?” I asked him.
“German fried potatoes,” he said blandly.
Lindbergh ordered vegetable soup and a hard roll; Breckinridge had the Lamb Chops Jafsie; and I had the Gow Goulash (named for Betty, the nurse, who’d come from Scotland to testify a few days before).
