Stolen Away (35 page)

Hauptmann came back and sat down, looking relieved. “It’s not free, but he’s trying. Someone is trying. That’s important. Where were we?”

“You mentioned the police had access to your apartment, because your wife and son moved out. Is that your reading of so-called rail sixteen, the piece of the ladder that’s supposed to come from your attic?”

He smiled mirthlessly, shook his head. “In the first place, this ‘rail sixteen’ have in it some large knots which alone would prevent a carpenter from making a ladder of it. Only it is not a ladder—it is a bad wooden rack. Its construction shows that it did not come from the hand of a carpenter, not even a poor one. Wilentz, he say I am not a good carpenter. I have worked for myself and as a foreman. You ask people about whether I am a good carpenter.”

“You think the wood was from your attic?”

He shrugged. “If so, they take it, not me.”

The kidnap ladder had been dismantled and reassembled time and again, for various tests.

“Wilentz says I am smart criminal,” Hauptmann said, with a faint sneer. “He says on these hands I must have worn gloves, because there are no fingerprints. On these feet I must have worn bags, because there were no footprints. If I was such a smart criminal, if I would do all those things, why would I go in my own house, and take up half of one board in my attic to use for one piece of this ‘ladder’—something that would always be evidence against me?

“If I wanted to make a ladder, could I not get from around my yard and around my garage all the scrap wood I need? Besides, only about one block from my house is a lumberyard. Listen, I am a carpenter—would I buy wood for five rails only and not know I need wood for six?”

“This wood expert, Koehler,” I said, “claims he tracked the wood the other rails were made of to that neighborhood lumberyard of yours.”

Hauptmann waved a hand gently in the air, as if trying to rub out a stain there. “Koehler himself says he have traced shipments of this lumber to thirty cities. If they sell this wood in Koehler’s neighborhood in Koehler’s town, does that make Koehler the kidnapper?”

“I wonder where he was March first, 1932,” I said. “But you’re right: once the cops get a suspect, the evidence can be made to fit.”

“And if they have evidence that does
not
fit,” he said, “this evidence, it disappears. When I was arrested, they took among many things, my shoes. What for I at first could not imagine; but then I think: they have a footprint!”

“They do,” I said. “‘Cemetery John’ left one at St. Raymond’s.”

“Then why did they not produce the plaster model that was made?” With bitter sarcasm, he said, “Perhaps they hold this damning evidence back, out of pity for me.”

Reilly should have demanded that plaster cast be produced; but then Reilly should have done a lot of things.

“Did you know they took my fingerprints not once, but again and again? Also the sides of my hands, the hollow parts of the hands. Then at the trial, when my counsel asks about fingerprints, Wilentz says, ‘There are no fingerprints.’”

“There were plenty on the ladder,” I said. “That’s what they were checking against.”

“And found not mine! In the nursery there were no fingerprints at all. Not of the parents, not of the child’s nurse or the other servants. They say I wear gloves. Did the parents, then, when they go to the room to take joy in their child, and all the servants, also wear gloves?”

“It does sound like somebody wiped the room down.” Somebody in the house. Somebody after the fact.

“They found a chisel near the ladder. They compare it to my carpenter’s tools. My tools are a Stanley set; the one they found is a Bucks Brothers chisel. They told the jury, ‘This is Hauptmann’s chisel,’ and the jury believed them.”

“But they didn’t believe your eyewitnesses, did they?”

“My eyewitnesses were good, but then Reilly
hired
more witnesses,
bad
witnesses! They were killing me! Crazy people from asylums, people with criminal records…and Wilentz makes of them fools. Because of that, the good people, the witnesses who tell the truth for me, they are not believed. The five people who saw me in New York in the bakery with Annie at the time of the crime,
good
people, are made out to look like liars. One of these, Manley, an old gentleman, arose from a sickbed and he swore that on the night of March first, 1932, he saw me at nine o’clock in his bakery.”

I snorted a laugh. “Yet old ‘Cataracts’ Hochmuth and that movie cashier and the taxi driver, questionable eyewitnesses at best,
were
believed.”

“Why, Nate? Why?”

“Well…you mentioned witnesses with criminal records. You do have a criminal record yourself, Dick.”

“Yes, in Germany—after the war. Never in America.” He placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “I come home from the war in rags, sick with hunger. So, too, I find my mother and my brothers and sisters starving. I did steal an overcoat and I stole food. I was just a boy. These things are wrong, yes, but many times by many people were they done in my country after that war. And I have never once injured a human being.”

“You broke and entered through a second-story window, once. And you held up two women wheeling baby carriages—with a gun. Add those two crimes up, and…”

“There were no babies in those carriages! In Germany, at that time, they use those buggies as shopping carts. You know what I stole? Nine bread rolls and some food ration cards. No babies did I frighten.”

“And the second-story job?”

He shrugged. “It was the mayor’s office, as much a prank as a robbery. I stole a silver pocket watch and a few hundred marks. I’m not proud of this—I knew I was doing wrong. I quieted my conscience with, ‘Oh well, others do it, too.’”

Reilly should’ve brought this stuff out at the trial; Wilentz killed Hauptmann with the baby-buggy stickup—which shouldn’t have even been the hell admissible!

“I understand all this, Dick,” I said, “but
you
have to understand how it worked against you. Just being a German works against you, frankly. And hell—you were a machine gunner in the war—which makes you a killer.”

He sneered a little, and his response was justifiably sarcastic: “Oh—so no American machine gunners were in the war?”

I shook my head. “When the killing’s on your side, it doesn’t count—particularly when you win. And I don’t think your popularity’s been helped by these Nazi
bund
-type rallies, either, raising money for your defense fund.”

The sarcasm evaporated. “What choice have I? The state confiscated our funds, Annie and me. Are you a Jewish man, Nate?”

“My father was. I’m not very religious.”

“I am.” He smiled nervously. “Religious, I mean. Do you hate me for being German? Do you think I think I am the ‘master race’? Do you think I would hate a Jewish man?”

Wilentz, maybe.

“I’m an American,” I said, “whose forefathers came from Germany. Why should I hate you, or make such assumptions?”

Rather shyly, he touched my shoulder. “Mr. Heller—why weren’t you on the jury?”

“Dick,” I said, “you don’t have to convince me that a lot of the evidence was tampered with or invented. You don’t have to tell me that Hochmuth was blind, or that that movie cashier who said she remembered you was full of shit. I used to be a cop. I know all about that stuff.”

“What
do
you want me to tell you?”

“Tell me about Isidor Fisch.” I smiled gently. “Your Jewish friend.”

He laughed soundlessly. “The ‘Fisch story,’ they call it.”

“Everybody did say it smelled.”

“It sounds bad. But it’s true.”

“Tell me. Take your time.”

He drew in a breath, let it out slowly. “I meet Isidor Fisch at Hunter’s Island in Pelham Park. Annie and I and our friends go there many weekends in the winter and summer both. We have enjoyed a wonderful outdoor life there, boating, swimming, fishing…” A small private smile appeared, and a distant look came to his eyes. “…cooking over a fire, playing music and singing…Annie bought me field glasses. I loved to watch the birds.” That brought him back to reality. He got up from the cot and moved quickly to the bars and looked out.

“It’s still caught,” he said, shaking his head. “They give up. Damn. A free thing like that should never be in there.”

“Richard,” I said. “Dick. Tell me about Izzy Fisch.”

He shuffled back over and sat on the cot. He said, “Fisch I meet three, four times at Hunter’s Island. Once he mentions that he is interested in the stock market, like me. But he tells me he is in the fur business, and that there is good money in it. He knows of what he is talking, was a furrier in the old country. I buy some stocks and bonds for him, he bought some furs for me…I start with five hundred dollars I give him to buy furs, and keep reinvesting, until I finally have seven thousand dollars in furs.”

“Where were all these furs being stored?”

“In the fur district in New York, Fisch said, but we never got around to going to where they were in a warehouse. Fisch was sickly, had a bad cough.”

So did Jafsie’s Cemetery John, I recalled.

“One day he said he was going to Germany to visit his parents. He asked me to keep four hundred sealskins at my home, while he was gone. Later on, he asks me when he goes to Germany if he can leave with me some of his belongings, and he brought to my house two satchels, a big one and a small one.”

“What about the money?”

Hauptmann motioned for me to be patient. “The Saturday before Isidor left for Germany, my wife and I give for him a farewell party. He brought along under his arm a cardboard box, wrapped up with string, and asks me to put it in a closet for him and keep it until he comes back. I thought maybe in the box were some things he forgot to put in the satchels, maybe papers and letters. I put the package for him on the upper shelf of the broom closet. It was too high there, for my wife to see, although they try to make her look bad at the trial, because they claim the shelf was low and she cleaned in there and she should see it. But she never did. Anyway. After a while there were rags and things on the shelf, covering up the box, and I forgot all about it. Fisch, he told me he would be back again in two months.”

“But you never heard from him again.”

“Oh, but I did. He wrote me a few times…and then, in March or April, from his brother Pincus I get a letter saying Isidor have died. Pincus asked me, in his letter, as he knew I was a friend of Isidor’s, to look after his brother’s financial business in this country. So I wrote and told Pincus how we stood in the stock and fur business.”

From the expression on Hauptmann’s face, I could tell there had been discrepancies.

“Fisch have told me that he got bank accounts and a safe-deposit box and that he also got ten thousand dollars in some company that bakes pies. Also lots of furs. And that a friend owed him two thousand dollars. But when I start to look around after Isidor have died, I find that the pie company is a fake and that Fisch owes the friend eight hundred dollars, and that another friend he owes four thousand dollars. I could find no furs, except the four hundred skins at my house, which are not worth half what he told me. So I am all mixed up.”

“So you opened up that little box in your closet, and…”

“No! I have forgot all about that box. I go to Fisch’s lawyer, who tells me there is no money, nothing valuable in the safe-deposit box. And I give up.”

“You gave up?”

“Yes. But three or four weeks before I get arrested, it has been raining, like tonight…and the water comes in the broom closet and as I am cleaning it up, I run across the box, soaking wet. When I look, I find it is full of money! Oh ho, I say to myself—this is where Izzy’s money has gone. What he has saved up, he has put in gold certificates. I put the money in a pail, and took it to my garage, where I dried it and hid it like the police found it, except for the few bills I have already spent. I did not put it in the bank, because with gold certificates, I think I should have trouble.”

“You helped yourself, because Izzy was into you for, what? Seven grand?”

He nodded. “Because he owed me money and have tried to cheat me, I see that money and feel it is largely mine.” He shook his head, sighing heavily. “Could I have known that money was Lindbergh baby money? No! The gas station man have testify that I say to him when I gave him that bill, ‘I have a hundred more like that at home.’ Would I say that if I knew that these bills maybe could take my life some day?”

“But you lied to the cops about the money.”

“Because I have gold certificates, and it is illegal! I knew I would get in much trouble if they knew I had so much gold money, and besides, near the money in my garage I have hidden also a pistol which I know I am not supposed to have.”

“Do you think Isidor Fisch was involved in the kidnapping, or anyway, in the extortion?”

He shook his head slowly, hopelessly. “I don’t know, Nate. I wish I did. I know, when I ask around about him, I find he was not the man I thought. He was a crook. Maybe he was trading in what they call ‘hot money.’”

There were footsteps in the corridor.

“Pincus, Izzy’s brother, wrote me to say that shortly before Isidor died, from his bed of death, he called out for me—he seemed to want to say something about me. But he was too weak. He took to his grave that which would be of great help to me now.”

Warden Kimberling’s stocky figure—now in a gray business suit, the black slicker gone—appeared beyond the iron bars. “Mr. Heller, just a few more minutes.”

“Would you mind checking on my secretary, Warden? See how she’s doing?”

He nodded.

As he moved through the door, I saw that whenever that door opened, Hauptmann got a nice clear view of the electric chair, covered in white.

“Six men have walked by me, going to that room, since I come here,” he said with no apparent emotion. “Some of them silent, some of them crying, some even scream.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

The door closed, the warden presumably having a little chat with Evalyn.