Stolen Away

“Even then. It cost over a million dollars to put Hauptmann on death row…but right now I don’t have a single dollar of state funds available to try to get him off death row.”

“Excuse me?” I didn’t like the sound of this.

“Mr. Heller, I staked the investigators I mentioned on my own—on small sums that barely covered their expenses, out of my own meager resources.”

“Governor, no offense—but the terms we discussed on the phone, those aren’t negotiable.”

“I’m not the one paying your fee, Mr. Heller.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I mentioned an old friend of yours…just a moment.” The intercom on his desk was buzzing. A garbled voice spoke to the governor, and he said, “Fine. Send her in.” He looked up at me with his ready smile; he put out his cigar. “The party who recommended you is paying for your services.”

The door opened behind me and a small handsome woman in a black dress and a black fur and a black hat with a black veil entered; jewelry glittered amidst the somber apparel. Perpetually in mourning for who knows what, Evalyn Walsh McLean entered the room, and reentered my life.

“Governor,” she said, smiling sadly, extending him her black-gloved hand; he rose behind the desk and took it, briefly. She turned to me. Behind the veil her eyes seemed tragic and delighted. “Nathan. It’s wonderful to see you.”

“Likewise, Mrs. McLean,” I said, taking her hand briefly. I gave her my chair and got myself a new one. I was suddenly nervous.

“Mrs. McLean has never lost her interest in the Lindbergh case,” the governor said.

“The official solution of this case,” she said, regally, “is not satisfactory. There are loose ends to be gathered up. And I felt Nathan Heller was just the man to do the gathering.”

She looked older, of course, but fine; her figure remained slender, busty, her face gaining character with the years without losing beauty.

“Mrs. McLean has rented the Hauptmann apartment,” Hoffman said. “So you can have a look around there. We’ve already had a criminologist in, and a wood expert, to have a look in the attic.”

The prosecution’s star witness was a wood expert named Koehler—who’d been about to testify the day I was at the trial, but got stalled by the defense.

“It struck me as ridiculous,” Evalyn said, “that a man who supposedly was so brilliant, so clever a master criminal that he could engineer the kidnapping of the century all alone, would also be so stupid as to fashion a single rail of the kidnap ladder from a floorboard in his own attic.”

“Actually,” I said, “what’s really ridiculous is the notion he’d need the lumber. Hauptmann was a carpenter. He had something of a workshop in his garage, didn’t he? There must’ve been scrap lumber all over hell.”

“And a lumberyard nearby,” Hoffman added, nodding.

“In any event, he wouldn’t have left the ladder behind,” I said. “Not a carpenter who fashioned it himself—particularly if one rail were a board from his own house. That evidence was as planted as the tree it came from.”

“So said our criminologist and a wood technician from the WPA,” Hoffman said, rather proudly. “The ladder rail was a sixteenth of an inch thicker than the attic boards. Also, the nail holes weren’t deep enough to accommodate eightpenny nails that came from the attic floor.”

“That ladder,” Evalyn said bitterly, “was what Prosecutor Wilentz pledged to ‘hang around Hauptmann’s neck.’”

“And he did,” Hoffman said. “The question is, Mr. Heller, can you give us something as major as that ladder—only favorable, and not fabricated? Something that no one, no matter how biased, could deny?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have very long, do I?”

“The end of the month.” He shrugged. “Fourteen days.”

“Hell,” I said, with blatantly phony optimism, “maybe Ellis Parker is right, and the kid’s still alive. Maybe I can track the boy down and sit him right there on your desk, and he can have an ice-cream cone while you phone his folks.”

Hoffman smiled at that, but sadly.

“We’ve tried everything,” Evalyn said, shaking her head, sighing. “I even hired the top defense attorney in the country, but it didn’t work out.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Why, Sam Leibowitz, of course,” she said. “But the approach Sam took was disastrous.”

Sam Leibowitz!

“How so?” I asked.

Hoffman sighed. “He was convinced Hauptmann was guilty. The few times he visited Hauptmann, he tried to badger a confession out of him. Felt if he could convince Hauptmann to name his accomplices, then Hauptmann’s life would be spared.”

“And how did Hauptmann react?”

“With his usual quiet indignation,” Hoffman said. “He did not crack—and Leibowitz was off the case as quickly as he came on.”

“Don’t you know,” I asked Evalyn, “who Leibowitz is?”

“Certainly,” she said stiffly, defensively. “He’s the best damn trial attorney in the country.” Then studying me, she melted and said, “Why, Nathan? What do you mean?”