Cold Morning (5 page)

“So you heard it before?”

“She hinted at it—in capital letters,” said Martha “She was always hinting about something big coming her way.” A smirk. “Then, if pushed, she'd clam up. ‘What do you mean?' Said in an exaggerated Cockney grunt. Hey, I'm from England, too. No one talks that way.”

“What do you know about her past?”

Horace spoke. “Not much. Her last job was at the Palmer House in Chicago.”

“Or so she said.” From Martha.

“You doubted that?” I asked.

“She had a lot of stories, that one. And a roving eye.” She glanced at her husband. “For weak men with wallets of dollar bills falling out.”

Horace had the decency to look embarrassed, this oily Lothario. But his severe face told me the conversation was over. “Perhaps you should talk to the cops,” he concluded. “I dunno, Miss Ferber, like pick Cody Lee Thomas out of a lineup or something.”

“One last thing, though.”

“What?” Martha said, impatient.

“Well, I understand that things have to be business as usual in the café. Yes, I get that. But there seems to be so
little
attention to her murder. That piece in the morning
Democrat
was so…dismissive. A footnote. A woman stopped for jaywalking. Trivial.”

“Well,” Martha insisted, “she's not the Lindbergh baby, you know.” Her British accent became more pronounced as her lips twisted into a snarl. “And she's not exactly Colonel Lindbergh, like an American hero. A big muckamuck.”

Her husband added, “And they got the murderer, no? Some rube from the boondocks. A shanty boy.”

“No matter, a woman's life…”

“But the matter is over,” Horace summed up. “Enough of this. Please.” With that he bowed and walked out of the office. Left standing near me, fiddling with a button on her uniform, Martha produced a quizzical smile that led me to believe that the loss of the flirtatious waitress was one less problem she had to deal with concerning her gadabout husband.

Chapter Five

“Edna dear,” Aleck called out as he joined me in the hotel lounge. “You missed a riveting opening of the trial. Whatever is the matter with you?”

“Tell me.”

“Well, David Wilentz thundered that Bruno snatched the child, the rung of the ladder breaking, the child smashing its head. Supposition, true, but galvanizing. Then he called Anne Lindbergh to the stand, and the silence in the room was palpable. Even Bruno Hauptmann flicked his rigid head a half-inch to the right. He even tapped his foot, that Bronx alien. She was grace itself, beautiful, dressed in a peach-colored blouse, a black-and-white dotted suit, a small black satin beret. Very Parisian. A blue fox fur off her shoulders. Discreet. Lindbergh himself watched her carefully, on one side Schwarzkopf, the other Breckinridge. Wilentz had her recite the events of March 1, 1932—deciding to stay another day at Hopewell because the baby had a cold, putting him to bed, dressing him in a flannel nightshirt, taking a bath, sitting with her husband who'd returned from the city, the nurse Betty Gow asking if she had the baby, if her husband had the baby. But the baby was gone. When Wilentz finished, defense attorney Reilly realized he'd better tread lightly. ‘The defense feels that the grief of Mrs. Lindbergh needs no cross-examination.'” Aleck sighed, seemed on the edge of sobbing. “She was magnificent.”

“It must have been unbearable.”

“And you missed it, Edna.”

“I had something to do.”

“More important?”

I deliberated. “As important.”

“Impossible, you foolish woman.” He pointed a finger at me. “Do you believe in psychics?”

“Of course not.”

“I don't believe you. I often picture you sitting alone in your apartment, some witchery chant coming from your gramophone, a shawl draped over your shoulders, a crystal ball before you, as you commune with spirits.”

“What is your point, Aleck?”

“I received the strangest note this afternoon. A woman from Hopewell—or at least a farm near Hopewell, but a mile or so from the Lindbergh mansion—she informs me she heard noises the night Little Lindy was kidnapped.” He lowered his voice. “She reads cards, she wrote, and a message received said…”

“For God's sake, Aleck.”

“But she insists she heard German spoken in a grove of trees.”

“And she never told the police this before because…what? She forgot?”

He grunted. “She's visiting her daughter in nearby Raritan. We have an invitation.”

“
You
have an invitation. Have fun.”

He scrunched up his face. “You must come with me, dear Ferb. Old ladies give me the willies, present company often included.”

“Aleck.”

“I insist.”

“Being imperious is not a good role for you, Aleck. You lack the appropriate gold crown slipping down your forehead.”

He burst out laughing. “Proud of yourself, aren't you?”

Aleck insisted we commandeer the town car and dine at the Hawthorne Inn on the outskirts of the township where we'd meet the woman. “I hear great things about the restaurant.”

“I don't think the
Times
planned on our scooting around the countryside sampling the local cuisine.”

“Local color, dear Ferb. Trials are deadly—at least most of them. I need to spice up my running commentary.” A long pause. “Although my column on Anne Lindbergh's grace will move most to tears.”

“It'll move
you
to tears, Aleck.”

“I do sob at my own gripping prose.”

Old Willie was our driver, although he grunted when he was roused from his rooms at Mrs. Olsen's Rooming House. Yet, once behind the wheel as he was tooling out of town into the countryside, he chatted endlessly about the crowds of people streaming into Flemington—the enormous traffic jams as cars inched along. “Save time just to hang the bastard,” he concluded.

“You don't believe in a fair trial?” I asked.

“Not when everybody knows what's what.”

Aleck was amused. “And what is that?”

“The murder of a baby boy.”

“Tell me, Willie,” I started, “did you read about the murder of the waitress at the Union Hotel Café?”

“Yep. Heard all about it. It was in the
Democrat
.”

“
Barely
in the
Democrat
,” I snarled.

Willie glanced at me through the rearview mirror. “Your point, ma'am?”

“Annabel Biggs. A woman murdered.” My words sharp, hot.

Aleck frowned. “By her boyfriend, I gather.”

A long pause as Willie chewed the side of his face. “You know, his ma says he wasn't the one that done it.”

I sat up. I touched the back of the driver's seat. “You know him?”

The car slowed. “Not
him
, really. Sort of a big lout, keeps to himself. Folks say he's as dumb as a bucket of rocks. But his mother…she works as a housekeeper on a farm nearby, owner a friend of my brother who lives in Somerset.”

“What did she say? Tell me.”

He watched me through the rearview mirror. “Well, nothing to me. But my brother tells me his ma was crying and blubbering all last night, says her boy—he's like an overgrown child, that one, and slower than a slug on the mossy side of a tree—he was with her that night.”

The news troubled me. “His mother said that? And the police don't believe her?”

A dry chuckle. “What do you think?”

“Did you ever meet Annabel Biggs, Willie?”

“Naw. No reason to.”

Aleck was regarding me severely, his eyes popping behind his thick glasses.

“Perhaps his mother is telling the truth,” I went on.

Willie was tired of the conversation. “If you say so.”

“Well, I don't know, but…”

“A sad woman, that one. I met her a couple times at the general store, lugging groceries back to the farm. A widow, survived a drunk husband and a couple dead children. Burned out of a tarpaper hovel thick in the Sourland Mountains. Back of Lambertville, I hear.”

“This Cody Lee Thomas is an only son?”

“The only one that lived.” A sigh. “But, as I say, not the swiftest pebble washed up on the beach.”

“No matter.” I spoke through clenched teeth. “Yes, you've mentioned his stupidity too many times, Willie.”

“Can't help a man observing the world around him.”

“With compassion, no less.”

Aleck glanced at me, a nervous tic in his voice. “What is your point, Edna?”

“Annabel Biggs was up to something larger than a simple misguided romance with a country lout.”

Aleck rolled his eyes. “What do you think, Willie?” He inserted a cigarette into his holder and lit it. Smoke filled the backseat.

“Not much. I like to keep my mouth shut most times.”

“Yes,” I told him, “I've noticed.”

***

Willie sat in a tavern across from the Hawthorne Inn—“Have myself a cocktail, just one”—while Aleck and I ate supper, a pleasant enough meal made barely tolerable by the presence of Mavis Jones, who, it turned out, should have used her celebrated psychic powers to glean that Aleck and I would discount every word out of her mouth. A fussy old woman with an ancient fur cap pulled over stringy gray curls and a faded Mother Hubbard under a Persian lamb overcoat, she rattled on about the Germanic guttural mumblings she'd heard the night of the kidnapping. “Out on the road what leads to the colonel's mansion.”

Of course, she couldn't remember exactly when that was, admitted not knowing a word of German, and, in fact, confessed to living miles and miles from Hopewell—“My sister is a pig slaughterer in the woods”—and—well, would she receive payment for her information? Would Aleck have to use her name? She grinned at him, twinkled her eyes, and mentioned listening to his radio broadcasts when the winds and God allowed enough reception.

Aleck fumed, purposely blowing smoke into her face.

“No, my dear, it would be better if I not mention your name. I believe you already probably have enough humiliation in your life.”

“Aleck!” I admonished, but he shrugged me off.

Mavis Jones smiled broadly as though he'd complimented her for her discretion and decency or—God knew what?

“I'll listen again this Sunday,” she assured him.

“This is all your fault,” I said to Aleck when we got back in the car.

He sighed. “Of course you'd say that.”

Aleck's Sunday night half-hour on WOR out of New York City was growing in popularity. Last week he'd interviewed Darius Poor, a crime reporter from the
Daily Mirror
, who'd written about the various mythologies that erupted around the notorious kidnapping. A sprightly, somewhat sardonic, interview obviously caught Mavis Jones' psychic attention. Aleck and Darius made light of the wild rumors surrounding the horrific event, Aleck pooh-poohing three current stories being bandied about: one insisted that the kidnapped baby was
not
Charles Lindbergh, Jr.—in fact, the body was an anonymous child dumped in the bushes to distract the police. That road was a conduit for bootleg liquor, and the syndicate needed to end police searches there. Moreover, the real baby was being raised elsewhere in the vast Republic. Two, that Al Capone and the mythic Purple Gang were instrumental in kidnapping the child. Of course, Capone had publicly offered to help locate the child, should the government choose to release him from prison in Chicago. The authorities scoffed at that. And three, that Lindbergh himself was at the heart of some nefarious dealing because on the night of the kidnapping he was supposed to be in Manhattan addressing the New York University dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. Instead, he drove back to New Jersey, unexpectedly, forgetting his obligation, in time to be witness to the empty cradle upstairs.

“A maligning of a true American hero,” Aleck intoned on air. Darius Poor agreed. “Lunacy in the land.”

Of course, that broadcast brought out the loonies and the naysayers and the speculators and—and, well, enter Mavis Jones onto the scene, psychic and hearer of phantom Germanic voices in the wilderness of her scattered mind.

“Your fault…” I repeated to Aleck. “You cracked open the door of the asylum.”

Aleck smiled wanly. “I got a good dinner out of the evening.”

“What do you think?” I asked Willie, who, I noticed, had been paying attention to our conversation.

“Ma'am, as I say, I keep my mouth shut.”

“Yes…”

But he kept talking. “But it seems to me this is only the beginning of the circus.”

***

That night I sat on the edge of my bed, the radio on, listening to Walter Winchell's radio broadcast. “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea…” A clatter of telegraph keys—
tap tap tap
. That signature opening, followed by his staccato voice. Stops and starts, a broken rhythm that gave you a sense of immediacy. Hot off the press, Winchell sitting in your living room inside the Zenith console radio.

In my lap lay a copy of the day's
New York Daily Mirror
, the tabloid rag Winchell wrote for.

Early that day I'd seen the man strutting into the hotel lobby, grabbing the sleeve of the undersheriff, Barry Barrowcliff, as he handed him a note. He threw a sidelong glance at another reporter from the Hearst syndicate and frowned at the Hearst darling, Adela Rogers St. Johns, who was signing an autograph with a flourish. A gaggle of fawners hovered nearby, laughing loudly. At one point Joshua Flagg skirted by him, and Winchell called out to him—”Sir, a minute of your time”—but Flagg kept moving. Winchell leaned on the reception counter, a casual pose as he began a loud screed about his belief that David Wilentz would exact a confession from Bruno Hauptmann on the stand.

So now I listened to Winchell's summation of the day's events of the trial, a rat-a-tat-tat delivery that soon waxed eloquent as he rhapsodized about Anne Lindbergh's testimony, a bathetic encomium to her strength and beauty and resolve. A catch in his throat, he paused so that America could weep with him.

My Lord, I upbraided myself—I am so cynical. What is there about Winchell that so rankled?

He ended with a commentary about the prosecutor David Wilentz, “an advocate for justice,” and Edward Reilly, chief defense lawyer, a venerable old jurist, described as a “lackey in the employ of the underbelly of man's reason. Bruno's henchman.”

A man with a turn of phrase, that Winchell boy.

I waited as he spoke of little Flemington, of the “hominess” of the old village, of the venerable Union Hotel with its old-fashioned balconies and Victorian gingerbread trim, or the general store that still held a pickle barrel, the life of the average citizen. I waited. Not a single mention of the murder of Annabel Biggs, waitress at the Union Hotel Café. Not a word. I waited—that poor woman ignored and forgotten so soon. The golden god Lindbergh and demonic monster Hauptmann, the only antagonists in the Greek drama that was playing out against a Jersey backdrop.

I switched off the broadcast, annoyed by his ticker-tape delivery and smart-mouth tone.

I turned to his column in the
Mirror.

Again, not a word about the murder of Annabel Biggs or the arrest of Cody Lee Thomas.

I lay in bed that night with an indelible image of that waitress—that brash woman filled with mystery, up to some mischief. A woman whose secrets leaked out of her, uncontrolled, dangerous. Perhaps she said something of her scheme, her…pot of gold. Not a woman I could ever like or care to know. Dead now, supposedly at the hands of Cody Lee Thomas, the big, hulking bull of a man who'd towered over her in the parking lot the other morning. I realized I'd have to talk to the police—to tell them what I heard. Not that it mattered—Cody Lee was already under arrest.