anyway?”
“My name is Heller. I’m a detective from Chicago.”
“What are the Chicago cops doing in this, at this late date?”
“I’m private. Working for Governor Hoffman, and Mrs. McLean, here. You did write Jafsie’s number on the wainscoting, didn’t you?”
He nodded. Sighed heavily. “I got myself a real nice front-page scoop out of it. Got myself a big fat byline. But I never dreamed it would be one of the key goddamn pieces of evidence they used to nail that poor son of a bitch.”
“I never met a reporter with a conscience before.”
“I never knew I had a conscience, till you started slapping me around.”
“So it bothers you.”
“More than I even knew, apparently. I’m sorry. Blubbering like a baby like that…it’s really humiliating…”
“Will you come forward?”
“No,” he said.
“No!” Evalyn said, dumbfounded. The blood, and the sympathy, drained out of her face. She clutched my arm. “Give him the Chicago lie-detector test, Nate!”
“Huh?” O’Neil said. His eyes were large and scared.
“Easy, Evalyn,” I said. “I’m not so young and reckless, anymore.”
Besides, my gun was in my suitcase.
I put a firm hand on O’Neil’s shoulder; he was taller than me, by perhaps three inches, but I outweighed him twenty-five pounds. “You want to run that by me again?”
“I’m not coming forward. I can’t.” He held out his open palms like a beggar. “Precisely ’cause it did get into the trial, as evidence. I might go to jail. I could lose my job. I would be in very deep shit.”
“You are in very deep shit,” I said.
“No,” he said. “You can beat on me…incidentally, I’m prepared to fight you back, now…but it’s not going to change things. You’ll be the one in jail, for assault. And I’d sue Mrs. McLean out of some of that money she obviously has to burn.”
He was right. There really wasn’t much I could do.
“But if you’re investigating Bruno’s case,” he said, “trying to cheat the executioner out of his fun, at the last minute…I can be of help.”
“Oh?”
He nodded vigorously. His face was haggard, dark circles under the eyes. “Check the record. I’ve dug up any number of stories, since the Jafsie phone-number scam, bolstering Hauptmann’s position.”
“You mean you’ve been working to clear him?”
“Not exactly. I’m a reporter, and I do my job…but I’m working that angle, yeah.” He pointed a thumb at his chest. “I’m the guy who tracked down the employment agency records that showed Hauptmann was at work at the Majestic Apartments on March first, 1932, just like he said he was…when the cops conveniently lost the time sheets for that week.”
“You are trying to balance the books, aren’t you, Tim? What can you give me?”
“How about the real lowdown on Izzy Fisch?” he asked, with a wicked little smile, like a jeweler about to show Evalyn a really big rock.
She and I exchanged significant glances.
“What have you got, Tim?” I asked.
“Plenty. See, I’ve got a big story on Fisch in the works. Real in-depth. But none of what I’ve got is public knowledge yet-for example, I know that the cops have ledger books and letters they confiscated from this apartment, that tend to back up the so-called Fisch story-none of which was used at the trial. I know lab tests back up Hauptmann’s claim that the money he had was water-soaked. And I know that Fisch was a confidence man who borrowed money from friends to invest in nonexistent businesses. I can tell you, based upon dozens of instances I’ve tracked, that Isidor Fisch never once repaid a loan.”
“So he was a small-time con artist. But was he a large-scale crook?”
O’Neil shook his head, made a clicking sound in his cheek. “That I don’t know. Could he have been in on the kidnapping? Sure. Masterminded it? I dunno. I know this: the rooming house he lived in was right smack in the middle of the Italian mob’s stomping grounds.”
“Luciano territory?”
“And how.” He seemed amused as he asked: “Does a Chicago boy like you know what Luciano’s best-paying racket is, since Repeal?”
I nodded. “Dope.”
“Give the man a cigar. And here Izzy Fisch is, importing furs and making trips to Europe. Think he might have been importing more than just sealskins? And I was able to connect Fisch to at least one Luciano hoodlum, a guy named Charley DeGrasie, who’s dead now, unfortunately. That was when the story started getting a little warm, and I backed off.”
I was taking notes, by this time. “Is that all you have on Fisch, then?”
“Not hardly. I talked to a guy named Arthur Trost. He’s a paint contractor. He said he knew Fisch since the summer of ’31, that he used to run into Fisch at a billiard parlor in Yorkville-German section of Manhattan. Around the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Fisch stopped frequenting the place.”
“So?”
“So in the summer of ’32, a painter pal of Trost’s asks him if he wanted to buy some hot money for fifty cents on the dollar from a friend of his. Trost told the guy he’d have to meet the person doing the selling, and got escorted to that very same billiard parlor, where who should be waiting but Isidor Fisch. Trost told his pal that he already knew Fisch and that Fisch already owed him money and that he wouldn’t believe Fisch if he was calling for help from the window of a burning building.”
“So Trost never actually saw this ‘hot money.’”
“No. But it connects Fisch to dealing in hot cash, doesn’t it? Considering the timing, very likely Lindbergh cash. I also talked to a guy named Gustave Mancke, who runs an ice-cream parlor in New Rochelle. He and his wife Sophie swear that for an eight-week period in January and February of ’32, right up to the Sunday before the kidnapping, Izzy Fisch ate in their shop every Sunday evening.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a revelation.”
“It does when you consider Mancke claims Fisch would always meet with the same two people.”
“Oh? And who did he meet with?”
“Violet Sharpe,” he said, “and Ollie Whately.”
31
We had lunch on Italian Harlem’s market street-First Avenue-in a modest place called Guido’s where we had spaghetti and espresso. From our window seat we could see the crowded sidewalk where housewives bickered with vendors over greens, olives, cheeses, clams, whatever; it was an Italian version of Maxwell Street, a barrel of work gloves here, a bin of bread there, anything you needed, from pomegranates to underwear.
“I always think of Harlem as Negro,” Evalyn admitted, as we began dessert, each of us working on a gaudy pastry.
“East Harlem isn’t,” I said, cutting the dick-shaped sweet with a knife. “Lucky Luciano operates out of this part of town. Lucky and the boys noticed a long time ago there was money to be made in Negro Harlem.”
“Money?”
“Sure. Most of the big nightclubs in Harlem have Italian owners, or anyway mob guys like Owney Madden- you’ve heard of the Cotton Club, Evalyn? And a couple years ago, Luciano made his move on the colored numbers racket, from here.”
“This apartment house we’re going to,” she said, “seems to be mostly Germans.”
“Not surprising.”
