Stolen Away

To get to the attic hatch, I had to take the shelves down, stack them out in the hall, and scale the shelving cleats like some half-ass mountain-climber.

“Careful!” she said.

“Hauptmann must’ve needed that one scrap of lumber pretty goddamn bad,” I said, breathing hard, plastered to the closet wall like a bug, “to go looking for it up here.”

Balancing awkwardly, clutching a cleat with one hand, I pushed the trapdoor-like panel up with the other, then hoisted myself up through the tiny opening—perhaps fifteen inches square. The attic was a dark, musty, dusty inverted V that would make a midget claustrophobic.

I hung my head down the hatch where an eager-eyed Evalyn looked up from the linen closet. “See if the landlady has a flashlight,” I said.

“There’s one in the car.”

“Get it.”

I waited, still hanging over the open space—the air was better there—and thought about pudgy Governor Hoffman having to squeeze up through this space, which he had on at least one occasion. That was worth a smile.

Soon she handed me up the flashlight, standing on her toes to do it, and I got a better look at what turned out to be an unfinished attic. The flooring only went down the middle, with the joists, laths and plaster below bared at either side where the roof sloped low.

With the beam of the flashlight, it didn’t take long to spot the one floorboard that was half the length of the others—the one from which Hauptmann had supposedly sawed the wood for a rail of the kidnap ladder. It was also easy to spot what made that evidence smell: from the apex of the roof, there were thirteen boards on one side, fourteen on the other.

The fourteenth was the odd board out, and not just because it was the half-board: without it, the attic would have been symmetrical, a better, more likely carpenter job. The other boards had seven nails fastening them to the joists; the half-board, twenty-five.

I handed Evalyn down the flash, then lowered myself and dropped, shaking the floor as I landed. I told Evalyn what I’d seen.

“I understand there were something like thirty-five cops up there,” she said, with a disgusted smirk, “before anybody ‘noticed’ that extra, sawed-in-half floorboard.”

“One more closet to check,” I said, getting back into my suit coat. “I want to see the most famous Hauptmann closet of all: where Fisch’s shoebox was stowed.”

In the kitchen, the closet’s single shelf didn’t seem terribly high; this had been a broom closet—the hook where Mrs. Hauptmann had hung her apron was still there. Evalyn, short as she was, could almost reach the shelf, where the Fisch box had been kept, supposedly out of view from Anna Hauptmann.

“I don’t get it,” I said, looking at this low-flying shelf. “Wilentz made Hauptmann’s wife look sick on the stand, because she admitted she kept a Prince Albert tobacco can on the edge of that shelf…she kept soap coupons and such in there, and she talked about being barely able to reach it.”

“Then Wilentz showed photos and introduced data proving the shelf was lower than Anna claimed,” Evalyn said.

It had been a bad moment for Mrs. Hauptmann.

“Why would she lie about something so easily proven? Let’s have a closer look…”

I removed the single shelf. Then I shined the flashlight on the wall.

“That’s funny,” I said. “This closet’s been painted recently.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think the others have.” We went back for a second look; and, no, the other closets had well-aged paint jobs, even to the point of chipping and peeling.

I went back to the kitchen closet and ran my hand over that wall like a blind man reading a book in Braille.

“Jesus!” I said. “Give me that flashlight again!”

She did.

“This closet has been painted recently—but up here…” And I cast the flashlight beam up six inches above the shelf cleats. “…there’s an area where the paint indents.”

“Indents?”

“Yeah. There are layers and layers of paint on these walls, paint on paint on paint. Over the years, when this closet has been repainted, nobody bothered to take the shelf out. Just painted walls and shelf alike.”

“Yes. But…what…?”

“Well, up here,” I said, reaching, running my finger from left to right along the wall the width of the shelf, “the paint is only a coat or two deep. Let me show you.”

I lifted her by her tiny waist so she could run her fingertips along there herself. “You’re right! Nathan, you’re right…”

I set her down. “Get your criminologist back in here,” I said. “With the right chemicals, he can prove that shelf was moved. I think he can find where those cleats were originally attached, too, and filled in the meantime with putty, and painted over. Originally, that shelf was right where Anna Hauptmann said it was.”

“Then she really couldn’t have seen the shoebox!”

“No she couldn’t. The cops lowered the shelves, to make her look like a liar.”

Evalyn’s look of joy dissolved into a scowl. “Those bastards. Those bastards!”

I shrugged. “Police work,” I said.

From the other room, a male voice called, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!”

“In here,” Evalyn called,

“You expecting somebody?” I asked.