“It may not be the same child,” Marinelli said. “We can’t always know the meaning of what a medium says in a trance-interpretation is required, Mr. Heller. Will you put your gun away, please?”
He was standing there protecting his wife, who looked small and pitiful and, hell, I’d screwed her once upon a time, so maybe I owed them this one.
“All right,” I said. And I put the gun away. “Will you cooperate, if I need you to talk to somebody?”
“Certainly,” Marinelli said, summoning his dignity. “Who?”
“Governor Hoffinan of New Jersey,” I said.
He nodded solemnly.
I went to the door.
“Goodbye, Nate,” she said, quietly.
“So long, Sarah,” I said, shaking my head, and I went down to the sidewalk and stood there and shook my head some more and sighed. Evalyn, watching from the cafe across the street, came over and joined me.
“What did you find?”
“I’ll tell you all about it,” I said, “on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“We have one more stop this afternoon….”
The neat, trim two-story white clapboard in the Bronx was unchanged; so was the quiet residential street it was perched along. The lawn was brown, but evergreens hugged the porch.
I told Evalyn to stay in the car; she didn’t like it, but I made her understand.
“If there’s a witness,” I said, “this guy is liable not to say anything.”
The attractive dark-haired woman who answered the door did not recognize me at first.
“Yes?” she said, warily, the door only a third of the way open.
“Is Professor Condon in? Tell him an old friend’s dropped by.”
Her face had tightened. “Detective Heller,” she said.
“Hiya, Myra.”
The door shut suddenly-not quite a slam.
I glanced back at Evalyn, sitting in the Packard, and smiled and shrugged. She looked at me curiously, wondering if this interview was over before it began.
The door opened again and there he stood, in white shirtsleeves and vest and pocket watch, in all his walrus-mustached glory.
“Long time no see, Professor.”
“Detective Heller,” Dr. John F. Condon said stiffly. He extended his hand and I shook it; he squeezed to impress me with his strength, as usual. “I hope you’ve been well.”
“I’ve been okay. You’re nice and tan.”
“I have just returned from Panama.”
“So I hear. You took off, day before Hauptmann’s case came up before the Court of Pardons.”
He snorted. “That’s true. Though it is of no particular significance.”
“Isn’t it? Didn’t the Governor of New Jersey request that you stick around? And help clear up a few discrepancies in your various versions of various events?”
He raised his head. Looked down his nose at me with his vague watery blue eyes. “I had full permission of Attorney General Wilentz to depart on my holiday.”
“I’m sure you did.” I smiled blandly at him. “You might be wondering why I’m still interested in this case, after all these years.”
“Frankly, sir, I am.”
“Well, I’m working for Governor Hoffman now.”
He backed away, stepping into the entrance hall; I half expected him to hold up a cross, as if I were a vampire.
“Sir,” he said, pompously, “during my stay in Panama, I followed all reported developments in the Lindbergh case, and this man Hoffman seems bound and determined to maliciously impugn my character, my motives, my behavior.”
“Really,” I said.
He took a step forward and shook a fist in the air. “I would like to face this Governor Hoffman! I would like to nail these lies of his. I know he would have a good many men there, stronger than I-but even at my age, I can put up a good fight, Detective Heller! I can still handle myself.”
“Come along then. I’ll drive you there.”
His fist dissolved into loose fingers, which he used to wave me off. “Ah, I said I would
“Then why don’t you ask me in, and I’ll put the Governor’s questions to you, myself.”
“Detective Heller, I’m afraid I must decline, though I
“You are?”
“Certainly. If they’re submitted in writing.”
“In writing?”
“Yes-and I will of course submit my answers in the same fashion.”
“I see. How about answering just a couple of little questions for me, not in writing? For old times’ sake?”
He smiled in what I’m sure he imagined was a devilish manner. “Perhaps I’ll answer. Go ahead and pose your questions, young man.”
“Did you ever meet Isidor Fisch, when you were hanging around that spiritualist church on One-Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street in Harlem?”
His eyes bugged. He stepped back.
“Or maybe Violet Sharpe, or Ollie Whately? Maybe all four of you sat at the same seance table, one night. By the way, the Marinellis wouldn’t happen to have been students of yours, would they?”
The door slammed in my face.
“Yeah, Jafsie,” I said, “you can still handle yourself,” and joined Evalyn in the car.
33
Ghent was a tree-shaded residential section of Norfolk, just off the downtown, its narrow brick streets lined with old two-and three-story brick houses, some shoulder-to-shoulder and hugging the sidewalk, others with shamrock-green lawns moist from sheltering boxwood, magnolia and winter-barren crape myrtle. Piercing Ghent was the Hague, a small horseshoe-shaped body of water where skiffs and pleasure craft were moored. Nothing larger could navigate the pondlike harbor. Presumably it connected to the nearby Elizabeth River, but from the rubbery dock where Evalyn and I stood, you couldn’t tell; the funnels and masts of the busy bay were obscured by a bastion of riverfront buildings. The day was cool, the sky overcast, the water, indeed the world, a peaceful but chill gray-blue.
The sign on the central of several white-frame, green-roofed shambling dockside structures said “J. H. Curtis Boat and Engine Corporation.” Not a small operation, but not a large one, either-an obvious step down from the owner’s previous shipbuilding company, which had had among its many customers the German government. It was in that central building, in a modest, glassed-in office (no secretary, no receptionist) looking out on a big cement work area where several boatmen were sanding down the hull of a small racing craft, that we met with Commodore John H. Curtis.
“Mrs. McLean,” Curtis said, standing from a swivel chair at an obsessively neat rolltop desk, grasping the hand she’d extended, “it’s a great pleasure to meet you at last.”
“Thank you, Commodore,” she said. Evalyn wore another black frock, this one trimmed in white and gray, with a white-and-gray pillbox hat; she looked neat enough for a department-store window. “You’re looking well.”
