Stolen Away

“Really,” I said.

He took a step forward and shook a fist in the air. “I would like to face this Governor Hoffman! I would like to nail these lies of his. I know he would have a good many men there, stronger than I—but even at my age, I can put up a good fight, Detective Heller! I can still handle myself.”

“Come along then. I’ll drive you there.”

His fist dissolved into loose fingers, which he used to wave me off. “Ah, I said I would like to. But my womenfolk wouldn’t allow it.”

“Then why don’t you ask me in, and I’ll put the Governor’s questions to you, myself.”

“Detective Heller, I’m afraid I must decline, though I am willing to answer the Governor’s questions.”

“You are?”

“Certainly. If they’re submitted in writing.”

“In writing?”

“Yes—and I will of course submit my answers in the same fashion.”

“I see. How about answering just a couple of little questions for me, not in writing? For old times’ sake?”

He smiled in what I’m sure he imagined was a devilish manner. “Perhaps I’ll answer. Go ahead and pose your questions, young man.”

“Did you ever meet Isidor Fisch, when you were hanging around that spiritualist church on One-Hundred Twenty-Seventh Street in Harlem?”

His eyes bugged. He stepped back.

“Or maybe Violet Sharpe, or Ollie Whately? Maybe all four of you sat at the same séance table, one night. By the way, the Marinellis wouldn’t happen to have been students of yours, would they?”

The door slammed in my face.

“Yeah, Jafsie,” I said, “you can still handle yourself,” and joined Evalyn in the car.

33

Ghent was a tree-shaded residential section of Norfolk, just off the downtown, its narrow brick streets lined with old two-and three-story brick houses, some shoulder-to-shoulder and hugging the sidewalk, others with shamrock-green lawns moist from sheltering boxwood, magnolia and winter-barren crape myrtle. Piercing Ghent was the Hague, a small horseshoe-shaped body of water where skiffs and pleasure craft were moored. Nothing larger could navigate the pondlike harbor. Presumably it connected to the nearby Elizabeth River, but from the rubbery dock where Evalyn and I stood, you couldn’t tell; the funnels and masts of the busy bay were obscured by a bastion of riverfront buildings. The day was cool, the sky overcast, the water, indeed the world, a peaceful but chill gray-blue.

The sign on the central of several white-frame, green-roofed shambling dockside structures said “J. H. Curtis Boat and Engine Corporation.” Not a small operation, but not a large one, either—an obvious step down from the owner’s previous shipbuilding company, which had had among its many customers the German government. It was in that central building, in a modest, glassed-in office (no secretary, no receptionist) looking out on a big cement work area where several boatmen were sanding down the hull of a small racing craft, that we met with Commodore John H. Curtis.

“Mrs. McLean,” Curtis said, standing from a swivel chair at an obsessively neat rolltop desk, grasping the hand she’d extended, “it’s a great pleasure to meet you at last.”

“Thank you, Commodore,” she said. Evalyn wore another black frock, this one trimmed in white and gray, with a white-and-gray pillbox hat; she looked neat enough for a department-store window. “You’re looking well.”

“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.”