office at the Statehouse, going over the material on the case Governor Hoffman had gathered. Evalyn insisted upon coming along, though the governor had made arrangements only for me.
“Tell them I’m your secretary,” she said.
“Even Rockefeller doesn’t have a secretary that looks like you,” I said. “You’re going to have to stow all the ice in your purse.”
She did, only not all of it fit; she had to stuff some of the rocks in the glove compartment. I was driving her car, a black Packard Deluxe Eight convertible, its white top up in the rain. She’d driven from D.C., all by herself. She no longer employed a full-time chauffeur.
“Death row is no place for a lady,” I said.
“In my opinion,” she said, “it’s no place for a man, either.”
The state prison encompassed a full block between Federal and Cass Streets, its massive red stone walls decorated with serpents, rams, eagles and a few kneeling nudes, and studded with guard towers with quaint New England-style cupola roofs. The fortress was haloed in electric light, including opening-night-style moving beams, and loomed ominously against the black, rain-swept night.
“My Lord, what a sight!” Evalyn said.
“Damn near as big as your place on Massachusetts Avenue,” I commented, swinging around onto Third Street. We parked and crossed to the gate, Evalyn taking my arm, wobbling on her heels as we navigated puddle- filled potholes.
We were met at the gate by Warden Kimberling himself, a stocky figure in a black rain slicker, his oblong, fleshy face somber, his wire-frame glasses pearled with raindrops. A prison guard, also rain-slickered, the badge on his cap gleaming with moisture, gestured us along with a flashlight in one hand and a billy club in the other. As ushers go, he was an intimidating one. The rain was coming down hard enough to limit conversation to simple shouted introductions, and the warden and his man led us quickly across a courtyard to the chunky red-brick two- story building nearby that was, I soon realized, the death house.
We stepped into the dark room, and the beam of the guard’s flashlight lit on what at first looked like a ghost, but then, as bright overhead lights were switched on, became a chair. An electric chair, or to be exact,
“I’m not authorized to allow your secretary to accompany you,” Kimberling said. “But the prisoner’s cell is just across the way. If we leave the door ajar, she can hear your conversation, and take notes or whatever.”
I helped Evalyn out of her fur-collared velvet coat, which was as drenched as a well-used bath towel, and draped it and my raincoat over several of the folding chairs. I left my hat on the seat of one, and got out my notebook and a pencil and led the somewhat shell-shocked Evalyn Walsh McLean to a little wooden bench between the door and the sheeted electric chair.
“I don’t suppose you know speedwriting,” I said, softly.
She managed to crinkle a little smile. “No, but I have a lovely hand.”
“You have a lovely everything,” I said, and she liked hearing that, even after all these years. “But be careful who you show your handwriting specimens to…they might pin the ransom notes on you.”
Warden Kimberling ordered the guard to open the steel grillwork door, and led me through. A few paces and we were standing before the bars of a cell marked “9.” The only occupied cell on this floor.
Hauptmann, wearing a blue-gray open-neck shirt and dark-blue trousers, was on his feet, hands clutching the bars like a guy on death row in a bad movie; he was clearly worked up, his pale triangular face contorted, his eyes haunted. This was not the cool customer I’d been hearing so much about.
“Warden,” he said, his voice tight with desperation, the pitch surprisingly high, “you must do something.”
“Richard,” Kimberling said, not unkindly, “you have a visitor…”
Hauptmann hadn’t even looked at me yet. He stretched an arm out beyond the bars, pointing, pointing up.
“Look,” he said. “Look!”
We looked toward where he gestured; the slanting windows of the large skylight that rose above a second- floor cell-block were getting pelted with rain, the sound echoing softly but distinctly through the corridor. One of the metal-frame windows of the skylight had been cracked open to let air in; the angle was such that no water was dripping down, but there was another problem: a sparrow had got caught between the windows and the wire- mesh-covered iron bars beneath. The bird was trapped in the cell-like area, fluttering its wings, trying aimlessly, frantically, to free itself, beating its tiny wings against the wire.
“Do something, Warden!” he said. Hauptmann was at least as agitated as the bird.
“All right, Richard,” Kimberling said, patting the air, “I’ll put a guard on that. Now calm yourself. You have a visitor.”
Kimberling and the guard immediately moved off, Kimberling pointing up at the skylight, where the bird fought futilely. Maybe he really was going to attend to it.
Meanwhile, Hauptmann was looking at me carefully, suspiciously, like I was a suspect in a lineup; his concern for the bird was replaced by a sudden hardness. “I know you.”
“Well,” I said, “we’ve never met, but…”
“You testify against me.”
“Not against you. I just testified.”
“You are Jafsie’s bodyguard pal.”
“Jafsie is not my pal. That I assure you.” I extended my hand. “My name is Heller. Nathan Heller. I’m a private detective. Governor Hoffman has hired me to assist in the investigation to find the truth about this crime you’re accused of.”
His lips formed a faint, wry smile. “‘Accused’ is a wrong word to use, Mr. Heller…but kind.”
“Why don’t you call me Nate?”
“All right.” He extended his hand through the bars. “My name is Richard. Some friends call me Dick. Why don’t you call me that?”
“All right, Dick,” I said.
The press and the prosecution liked to call him Bruno; it made a Teutonic beast of him.
The warden approached as we were shaking hands. He said to Hauptmann, “We’ll take care of that problem,” meaning the bird. He looked at me. “If you need anything, at least one guard will be here at all times.”
“Could you let me in there?” I asked. “I don’t like having these bars between us.”
Kimberling thought for a moment, then nodded, and nodded again, this time to the guard, who turned a key in the cell door and admitted me.
Then the door made its metallic whine and clanged shut behind me and the key turned gratingly and I was locked in with Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
“Won’t you please sit?” Hauptmann said, and he gestured to his cot. I sat and then so did he. Near the cot was a table stacked with newspapers, magazines, various books, among them the Bible and thick paper-covered transcripts of his trial; on the wall behind the cot were pasted various pictures of his wife and his young son. There was a sink and a toilet; it was not a small cell, although tiny compared to one I’d seen Capone in back at Cook County, some years ago.
“I should explain why I’ve been hired,” I said.
“I know why,” he said.
“Has Governor Hoffman mentioned me to you…?”
“No. But you were police official from Chicago who came to work on the kidnapping, in early days.”
“That’s right.”
“So you have knowledge of this case not just anyone have.”
“Well, that is right. You have a good memory.”
He nodded toward the trial transcripts. “I have time for reading. I know much about every witness who spoke for, and against me. I have ask about you. You were in some things involved that the newspapers wrote up. In Chicago.”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”
