Stolen Away

“I’m going to try,” I admitted.

“You should believe in God, Nate. I know He will never permit some persons to commit a murder on me.”

“Murders do happen, Dick.”

He laughed, and some bitterness crept back in. “Yes—the poor child have been kidnapped and murdered, so somebody must die for it. For is the parent not the great flier? And if somebody does not die for the death of the child, then always the police will be monkeys.” He shrugged, his smile was a humorless, fatalistic smirk. “So I am the one who is picked out to die.”

There was nothing to say to that. I gave him a tight smile, a little pat on the shoulder, and got the hell out, the door clanking shut behind me.

Evalyn, sitting on the bench, all in black, truly seemed in mourning now; she’d been taking notes, my rich little secretary, the pencil worn to a nub, her face tear-streaked.

She stood, wobblingly, and came into my arms. “That poor man,” she said. “That poor man.”

The warden was looking on from the doorway, uncomfortably.

“Let’s get our coats,” I told her.

From the cellblock, I heard someone say, “Damn.”

I let go of Evalyn and moved toward the warden and stood in the doorway and looked out at Hauptmann, one last time, a white face behind gray bars.

“At least he suffer not long,” he said, looking up.

I stepped out into the corridor and glanced up; and saw the small gray form of the bird motionless against the wire.

30

This neighborhood, at the far edge of the Bronx, had the small-town flavor of many a big city’s outlying sections. Most of the houses were two-family, two-story wood-and-stucco jobs with neat little lawns, often with a weed-patched vacant lot next door. Hauptmann’s residence—at 1279 East 222nd—was no exception: a two-and-a-half-story frame structure, its second story recessed, a stone wall bordering the front as steps rose gently to a winter-brown lawn dominated by bushes, a vine crawling up the tan stucco in front, toward the second-floor windows, like a cat burglar. At the right of the house was a vacant lot thicketed with weeds, halted at the far right by a rutted country lane, and just across that lane was what remained of the wreckage of the garage Hauptmann had built there. Behind the house, cutting off the lane, were woods, close enough to the house to provide shade, when the leaves returned, anyway.

I parked the Packard in front; Evalyn was with me. She wore a black-and-gray three-piece suit, one piece of which was her topcoat, and a black-and-gray beret. She wore only a few touches of jewelry, at my request—demand, actually, if she were to insist on playing “Thin Man” with me. At least she didn’t bring her goddamn dog.

We had stayed, the night before, in separate suites at the Hotel Sterling, where Hoffman had made reservations for us in the section of the hotel known as the Government House; it had once been the governor’s mansion, so it was fitting in a way. Fancier digs than necessary, but I wasn’t paying.

We had talked into the night, over cocktails in her suite, the death-row confab with Hauptmann weighing heavily on both our minds. If anything romantic or sexual was going to reblossom between us, this was not the time or place or mood. I was curious, however, why Evalyn was still, after four long years, digging into this horrendous fucking case. Hadn’t she been burned badly enough by Gaston Means?

“Nate,” she said, “I’m sorry I failed to get that child back. I’m sorry I was tricked, I’m sorry I was swindled. But I’ll always be glad, in my heart, that there was something that compelled me to try.”

“Fine,” I said, just a little drunk. “Swell. But that wasn’t my question. Why are you still involved?”

She shrugged, and began to ramble in what seemed at first a nonresponsive way. “You know, I had to close down 2020 Massachusetts Avenue—I just couldn’t afford such a big place. And for a time I was in an apartment. Can you picture me in an apartment, Nate? Anyway, a while ago, Ned—my husband, remember him?—as our courtroom battles over custody of the children were continuing, took a bad turn. In terms of his health.”

“Oh? I’m sorry.”

“In terms of his mental health, actually. I’ll never divorce Ned—I won’t have to. There will be no more struggles over custody—the children are damn near grown, and, well…at intervals I get reports from a Maryland hospital concerning a patient there, who has morbid preoccupations and lives in a state of mental exile. Shut off even from himself. If he is addressed by his right name, he grows excited—and swears he is not a McLean.”

“I’m sorry, Evalyn.”