Stolen Away

“I feel well,” he said, with a nod of his large head, “all things considered.” And he looked pretty good at that: tall, tanned, rather stout; in his light-brown business suit, his brown-and-yellow tie, he could have stood next to Evalyn in that department-store window. Only the lines around his eyes gave away the stress.

“Thank you for seeing us at such short notice,” I said, and shook hands with the Commodore. He’d put two wood chairs with cushioned seats out, in anticipation of our arrival, and he gestured to them, and we sat, and so did he.

“We seem to have mutual interests, Mr. Heller,” he said, with a friendly but serious smile. Looking at Evalyn, he said, “I feel we have much in common, Mrs. McLean.”

“I believe we do, Commodore,” she said. “I feel we both suffered a certain public…humiliation…as a result of our sincere desire to do good in the Lindbergh tragedy.”

“I’ve been fortunate,” he said, swaying a bit in the swivel chair, “having my family stand behind me. My wife…well, without her, perhaps I would have been lost. But my business is going well, and my personal reputation, here in the Norfolk area, and in the shipping trade in general, remains untarnished.”

“I would assume that means, Commodore,” I said, “that you’d like to put this mess behind you, and get on with your life.”

“I’m getting on with my life quite nicely,” he said, sitting forward, his lips tightening, “but I don’t intend to allow the indignities done to me to stand unredressed.”

“You were accused of being a hoaxer, at first,” I said, “but were tried and convicted for obstructing justice- the state arguing that you aided and abetted the kidnap gang.”

“Yes,” Curtis said, with a mirthless smirk, “by failing to give ‘accurate information’ about them to the authorities.”

“So the State of New Jersey,” Evalyn said, eyes narrowing, “acknowledged that you were in fact in touch with the kidnappers.”

Curtis nodded. “The language of the court was ‘the actual kidnappers of the Lindbergh baby numbering seven or eight, and including a member of the Lindbergh household.’”

Early on, the position of Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch and others was that Violet Sharpe’s suicide was an admission of guilt; by the time of Hauptmann’s trial, that stance had been conveniently forgotten.

“It seems to me,” Evalyn said, her gloved hands folded in her lap, “that if the Hauptmann conviction was correct, your conviction should be set aside, Mr. Curtis…and your record cleared, and the fine you paid refunded.”

“And if your conviction was correct,” I said to Curtis, “then Hauptmann’s conviction should be set aside, and he should he a free man again.”

“You might think that,” Curtis said, with a wry, world-weary smile. “It was the same courtroom, one of the same prosecutors…. Did you know that I offered to testify against Hauptmann?”

“I’d heard that,” I said. God, was I glad he brought it up. “That’s one of the things I hoped to ask you about.”

The intermittent whine of a power drill in the outer work-area provided an uncomfortable edge to the conversation.

“I told them I thought I could positively identify Hauptman as the ‘John’ I dealt with,” he said, blandly. “There’d been much speculation that ‘Cemetery John’ and the rumrunner John I encountered might be one and the same.”

“Did you recognize Hauptmann?” I asked. “Was he your ‘John’?”

“From newspaper pictures and newsreels I’d seen,” Curtis said, “he could have been. I told Wilentz and crew that I would testify against Hauptmann in exchange for full exoneration and the return of the thousand-dollar fine. Schwarzkopf thought it was a swell idea, and couldn’t have cared less if I was telling the truth or not. But Wilentz was afraid to put me on the stand.”

“Why?” Evalyn asked.

“Because my story, the story I’d been telling all along, which was true, did not fit the tale they were spinning, this fantasy of Hauptmann being a lone-wolf kidnapper.”

Curtis’s yarn, I remembered, involved a large cast of characters, Sam and Hilda and Nils and Eric and Larsen and assorted rumrunners.

“Would you have testified against Hauptmann?” I asked.

“Yes,” Curtis said.

“Even if you didn’t really recognize him?” Evalyn asked, dumbfounded.

“Probably,” he said. “I’m not proud to admit it, Mrs. McLean. But at the time, it looked as though they had so much evidence against Hauptmann, it looked so convincing reading the papers, he seemed so undoubtedly guilty, I didn’t see the harm.”

Evalyn fell into a dark silence.

“I was at wit’s end in those months,” he said. “Several years ago, before my involvement with the Lindbergh case, I suffered a nervous breakdown, having to do with anxiety related to business difficulties. I was very near that point again.”

“That’s another reason they kept you off the stand,” I said bluntly.

“Perhaps. And perhaps they knew there was at least some chance that, face-to-face with Hauptmann in a courtroom, under oath, I might not point the accusing finger at him. I might simply tell the truth. And my truth is something the State of New Jersey has never been interested in.”

“You’re saying that had you ID’ed Hauptmann,” I said, “you most likely would’ve withdrawn that identification, in time.”

“Perhaps,” he said, nodding. Then he shrugged. “But perhaps not-had my good name been restored, and my thousand dollars, the better part of valor might have been to fade into respectable obscurity. I can only tell you, truthfully, that today, with my full mental faculties at my command, I would not wrongly testify against that man. Or any man. And having studied the case in some detail-and having had a firsthand view of Jersey justice-I’ve become convinced that poor bastard was railroaded. Pardon my French, Mrs. McLean.”

“Let me back up, just a second,” I said. “Do I understand you to say that now, today, with your ‘full mental faculties’ at your command, you claim the story I heard you tell Lindbergh was true? That you were in contact with the kidnappers, or at least with an extortion group that had inside information about the kidnapping?”

“I lied about one thing,” he said, raising a cautionary finger. “I said I’d seen ransom bills-that I was able to check serial numbers. I never did. I embellished the truth, because I was afraid that otherwise Colonel Lindbergh wouldn’t believe me when I said I was in contact with the kidnappers.”

That had been the part of Curtis’s story that had been the most compelling to Lindbergh.

“He seemed reluctant to get involved,” Curtis went on.

“You were there, Mr. Heller, you should remember this. I did it for his own good. To get him off the dime.”

“Otherwise, your story was true.”

“One hundred percent,” Curtis said. His eyes were hard and clear; his voice was the same. “I’m not a liar. I’m an honest man.”

“You were ready to lie about Hauptmann,” Evalyn said. Her eyes were hard, too, in a different way.

“And I lied about the ransom bills,” he admitted, and shrugged again, and sighed. Then he smiled, sadly. “But I’ve been honest with you about both of those things. And I’ve been honest with you about the mental strain I was under.”

“Is that why you confessed?” she asked. “Why you ‘admitted’ everything you’d said was a hoax, when in fact everything you’d said was true?”

“But not everything I’d said was true. I was kept awake for days, dragged here and there by the police, not allowed to get a change of clothes, rarely fed, and yes, under great mental strain. After a while, I admitted that one thing: that I hadn’t really seen any ransom money. And that, Mrs. McLean, was when the fun began.”

“I’d like to hear about that,” I said. “But from the beginning.”

Curtis told us how, while on Cape May for a meeting with “Hilda,” his contact with the kidnappers, he’d been