half-story frame structure, its second story recessed, a stone wall bordering the front as steps rose gently to a winter-brown lawn dominated by bushes, a vine crawling up the tan stucco in front, toward the second-floor windows, like a cat burglar. At the right of the house was a vacant lot thicketed with weeds, halted at the far right by a rutted country lane, and just across that lane was what remained of the wreckage of the garage Hauptmann had built there. Behind the house, cutting off the lane, were woods, close enough to the house to provide shade, when the leaves returned, anyway.
I parked the Packard in front; Evalyn was with me. She wore a black-and-gray three-piece suit, one piece of which was her topcoat, and a black-and-gray beret. She wore only a few touches of jewelry, at my request-demand, actually, if she were to insist on playing “Thin Man” with me. At least she didn’t bring her goddamn dog.
We had stayed, the night before, in separate suites at the Hotel Sterling, where Hoffman had made reservations for us in the section of the hotel known as the Government House; it had once been the governor’s mansion, so it was fitting in a way. Fancier digs than necessary, but I wasn’t paying.
We had talked into the night, over cocktails in her suite, the death-row confab with Hauptmann weighing heavily on both our minds. If anything romantic or sexual was going to reblossom between us, this was not the time or place or mood. I was curious, however, why Evalyn was still, after four long years, digging into this horrendous fucking case. Hadn’t she been burned badly enough by Gaston Means?
“Nate,” she said, “I’m sorry I failed to get that child back. I’m sorry I was tricked, I’m sorry I was swindled. But I’ll always be glad, in my heart, that there was something that compelled me to try.”
“Fine,” I said, just a little drunk. “Swell. But that wasn’t my question. Why are you still involved?”
She shrugged, and began to ramble in what seemed at first a nonresponsive way. “You know, I had to close down 2020 Massachusetts Avenue-I just couldn’t afford such a big place. And for a time I was in an apartment. Can you picture me in an apartment, Nate? Anyway, a while ago, Ned-my husband, remember him? — as our courtroom battles over custody of the children were continuing, took a bad turn. In terms of his health.”
“Oh? I’m sorry.”
“In terms of his mental health, actually. I’ll never divorce Ned-I won’t have to. There will be no more struggles over custody-the children are damn near grown, and, well…at intervals I get reports from a Maryland hospital concerning a patient there, who has morbid preoccupations and lives in a state of mental exile. Shut off even from himself. If he is addressed by his right name, he grows excited-and swears he is not a McLean.”
“I’m sorry, Evalyn.”
She smiled it off gaily and it was about as convincing as wax fruit. “At any rate, the court awarded me Friendship, the McLean estate, and that was where I was living when the Hauptmann trial was held. I witnessed it from a distance, with some skepticism, as anyone familiar with the facts of the case well might, and afterward, to fill my rich, idle time, I procured the many-volumed transcript of that trial. If it could be called a trial. To me, it was a disgusting hippodrome.”
“And you got interested again.”
“I was always interested,” she said, with a little laugh. “I think I paid for the right to remain interested, don’t you? And I think I have the right to be concerned when someone else is being wronged in this convoluted affair. And the way Mr. Hauptmann is being wronged makes the injustice done me pale in comparison.”
“Your concern for Hauptmann is admirable,” I granted her. “But the possibility remains that he was, in some way or manner, involved in at least the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion caper. He was convincing tonight, but many a guilty man is, where his innocence is concerned.”
“I’m concerned about more than just Hauptmann’s innocence,” she said. Her eyes glittered over her cocktail glass. “I have my doubts about that little skeleton they found in the woods.”
“Well,” I admitted, “after that photo Hoffman showed me, I can see why.”
“Nate, thousands upon thousands of people had combed those woods near the very spot the little body was found. Hell, even the brush
“Underneath?”
“Only a few feet away, telephone workmen had put up a pole, laying wires, because of the need for extra communcations in those frenzied early days.” Her archness was offset by her sincerity. “Those tiny bones, who’s- ever they were, must have been placed there, long after the fact.”
“Slim’s identification of the body
She studied her drink, then made a confession: “Well, there was one other person who made an identification.”
That was the first I’d heard of that. “Who in hell?”
“Betty Gow,” she said. “The nurse. She viewed the little body, too, and identified it as Charles Lindbergh, Jr.”
“Based on what? There was nothing to identify. I saw the photo…”
“There was a tiny garment under the bones. Betty Gow claimed to recognize it as a little shirt made by her, the night of the kidnapping, to wrap the child in because he had a cold. She claimed she knew it from the thread, the distinctive blue thread she’d used.”
“I see. Still sounds a little thin. But that
“Yes-but couldn’t that garment have been planted, as well?”
“I suppose…now we’re getting a little overmelodramatic, aren’t we, Evalyn?”
“Are we? Haven’t you always thought someone on the ‘inside,’ with either the Lindbergh or Morrow family staff, was somehow in on the crime?”
“Yes. So, what? You’re saying Betty Gow might have lied, or helped plant that little shirt…”
“Not necessarily. The cloth and the thread were provided to Betty Gow, the night of the kidnapping, by the butler’s wife-Elsie Whately.”
The Hauptmann apartment took up the second floor of the house, a mostly empty five rooms for which Evalyn had been paying, since December, fifty dollars a month to the seventy-year-old widow who lived below.
As I wandered the empty rooms I remembered reading of the new, rather expensive furniture the Hauptmanns owned, which had seemed so suspicious to the cops and prosecutors. A walnut bedroom suite, an ivory crib, a floor-model radio in a nice walnut veneer cabinet-all gone, sold to help pay for the defense effort. Now there was nothing in this apartment but the bare floors, faded wallpaper and our echoing footsteps.
“As many people as have been through here,” I said, “I don’t know what I expected to find.”
Evalyn had been following me like a dutiful puppy through the small living room, the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the bath. “It doesn’t seem to me,” she said, “that the Hauptmanns were living in the lap of luxury.”
“It doesn’t even seem that way to me,” I said, “although this is about right for a man operating a little contracting business…dabbling in the stock market in a minor, amateur way…his wife working full-time as a waitress in a bakery. About right. Let’s look in those famous closets, shall we?”
In what had been the nursery, I found the closet where the wainscoting had been removed to show the jury the “evidence” of Jafsie’s phone number having been written there. Last night I’d told Evalyn what I had heard about the reporter on the
In the ceiling of what had apparently been a linen closet, off the hall, was the access panel to the attic.
“I’d better make this trip by myself,” I advised Evalyn, who had one look inside and agreed. I handed her my suit coat.
To get to the attic hatch, I had to take the shelves down, stack them out in the hall, and scale the shelving cleats like some half-ass mountain-climber.
“Careful!” she said.
“Hauptmann must’ve needed that one scrap of lumber pretty goddamn bad,” I said, breathing hard, plastered to the closet wall like a bug, “to go looking for it up here.”
Balancing awkwardly, clutching a cleat with one hand, I pushed the trapdoor-like panel up with the other, then hoisted myself up through the tiny opening-perhaps fifteen inches square. The attic was a dark, musty, dusty inverted V that would make a midget claustrophobic.
I hung my head down the hatch where an eager-eyed Evalyn looked up from the linen closet. “See if the landlady has a flashlight,” I said.
