The office was a sumptuous, dark-wood chamber with an enormous Oriental carpet, and a fireplace in which flames were quietly licking logs. A big, warm room, slightly cooled by formal, forbidding oil portraits of unknown past Jersey dignitaries, it nonetheless had the unlived-in, transitory feeling of the elective official’s office. The huge, yellow globe near the desk seemed never to have been spun; the leather-bound books shelved behind the governor seemed never to have been cracked open; the flags—American at left, state at right—slumped on poles, never to be unfurled. The wooden filing cabinet, about ten feet away, seemed there only to provide a resting place for a silver loving cup of flowers.
“That was an old friend of yours,” the governor said with a smile, as he hung up, offering no further explanation. He stood and extended his hand, and I stood and extended mine; our grips were suitably masculine and firm. We sat back down.
“I’m delighted you’ve come, Mr. Heller,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “You’re just the man for this job.”
“What job is that, exactly?”
He twitched a smile, eyes twinkling; there was an endearing pixielike quality about him, a streak of unexpected mischief.
Then his expression turned solemn. “Mr. Heller, I’ve employed several other private detectives, and we’ve come up with a good deal of evidence…unfortunately, none of it compelling enough to get Richard Hauptmann a new trial. Nor am I in a position to grant him a pardon, or commute his sentence to a prison term.”
“Oh?”
He shook his head. “I’m only one member of the Court of Pardons. In New Jersey the governor has no authority to commute a capital sentence. And I can’t issue another reprieve unless you come up with something so startling that my Democratic Attorney General can’t ignore it.”
“Wilentz, you mean.”
“That’s right. We’re old school pals, Dave and me. You met him, didn’t you?”
“Briefly. I saw him in action at the trial. I was only there one day, but it was an eyeful. Slick operator.”
He nodded, reaching for a humidor on his desk. “He is, at that. Care for a cigar?”
“No thanks.”
He lit his up; a big fine fat Havana. “Funny thing is, Dave is anti-capital punishment. Me, I have no compunction about showing a murderer the door to hell.”
Yes, I was back in the Lindbergh Case, aboard the Melodrama Express.
“Why,” I asked, “does the State of New Jersey need private investigators?”
“I’m surprised you’d ask that, Mr. Heller, considering that once upon a time you had considerable contact with our State Police, specifically Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.”
I shrugged, nodded.
He narrowed his eyes, staring at me forcefully. “You see, I went to the death house, Mr. Heller, to see Bruno Richard Hauptmann…I’d heard he wished an ‘audience’ with me, and, rather on the sly, I granted him one, thinking, I admit, that I might hear a confession. Instead, I heard a quietly indignant man, a man of considerable dignity and intelligence, who raised a good number of questions that I had to agree needed answering.”
“Ah,” I said, smiling, suddenly making a connection. “So you went to the head of the State Police to find out the answers to those questions.”
“Precisely. And our mutual friend Colonel Schwarzkopf ignored my executive order to reopen the investigation, sending me monthly, token notes to the effect that there were no new developments. When I granted Hauptmann the thirty-day reprieve, I began hiring my own investigators, and essentially ‘fired’ Schwarzkopf from the Lindbergh case. There is, as you might imagine, no love lost between us.”
“Was Hauptmann himself the reason you got involved in this?” I asked, knowing the governor had been accused of playing politics. “Was he that convincing a jailhouse lawyer?”
“He was convincing, all right. But there were other factors. I believe you’ve met New Jersey’s answer to Sherlock Holmes—Ellis Parker?”
I nodded. “At Lindbergh’s estate, in the early days.”
“Parker’s been conducting his own investigation,” Hoffman said, “although I haven’t been privy to any results as yet. He’s one of the people I want you to look up, in fact; he’s playing his cards a little too close to his vest, for my money.”
“The old boy’s a showboat,” I said. “But don’t be fooled by the hick veneer.”
“Oh, I’m not. And I take his opinion quite seriously. He thinks Hauptmann is innocent, or at least no more than a minor figure, who is taking the fall for the real kidnappers.”
“Have you considered the possibility that the ‘Cemetery John’ extortion group may never have had the child?”
He nodded vigorously, exhaling smoke, gesturing with the cigar. “Yes, and consider this, Mr. Heller—Ellis Parker insists that the baby found in that shallow grave in the Sourlands woods was
“Well, I understand Slim Lindbergh’s identification of the body was pretty perfunctory.”
