Mount Holly, New Jersey, was a sleepy little village at the base of the holly-covered hill from which it took its name. Despite some modern stores, the effect was of a place where time had frozen toward the middle of the previous century; along the broad, tree-lined streets were the simple square two-and three-story brick homes erected by the village’s early Quaker residents-solid-wood shutters and wrought-iron fences and rails. On this cheerless, chill March afternoon, the smell of smoke from old-fashioned wood-burning stoves singed the air.
I parked the Packard on Main Street right in front of the old courthouse where Ellis Parker had kept his office for over forty years. The courthouse was a two-story yellow-brick structure with green shutters, white trim and a stately bell tower-wearing the date it was built like a badge: 1796. Moving across a patterned brick sidewalk over a small flat lawn to the front door-a vast oak slab with a colonial lantern nearby and the coat of arms of New Jersey in granite just above it-I felt I’d taken a left turn into another era.
Parker was in the second-floor rear office, in back of a bustling reception area where his deputies and his secretary had desks. The secretary, a dark-haired, bespectacled matronly woman, ushered me into Parker’s presence.
The Old Fox, sitting in a swivel chair at a cluttered desk, was in shirtsleeves and suspenders, a food-flecked tie loose around his unbuttoned collar. He was as I remembered him: paunchy, bald, what little remained of his hair white, his mustache and eyebrows salt-and-pepper. His eyes were wide-set and drowsy. He was puffing a corncob pipe and looked like a farmer halfheartedly dressed for church.
The office was as quaint as a Currier and Ives print, only not near as cute: the desk littered with correspondence, reports, case histories and memos; a windowsill precariously balancing numerous telephones and directories; baskets and boxes in corners teeming with books, trial-exhibit photographs and maps; bulletin boards papered with police-department circulars, some boldly inscribed “Captured” and “Convicted” in black grease pencil; and sitting in one corner, on a chair, wearing a hat, a human skeleton.
“The Chicago man,” he said, smiling with the natural condescension of the rural for the urban. “Have a seat, young fella.”
I pulled up a hardwood chair. “I’m surprised you remembered me,” I said, as we shook hands.
He snorted, holding onto the corncob pipe with his other hand; the tobacco smelled like damp leaves burning. “Couldn’t forget the feller who ran interference for me-got me in to see Colonel Lindbergh, when that son of a bitch Schwarzkopf was set on keeping me out.”
“As I recall,” I said, “getting in to see Lindbergh didn’t do you much good.”
He shook his head, no. “He’d been poisoned against me. Politics. It’s all politics.” He smiled privately. “But he’ll listen to me now.”
“It’ll have to be by wireless,” I said. “He lives in England these days, you know.”
“He’ll come back for this,” Parker said confidently. “It’s gonna be a whole new ball game, when this hits the fan.”
“What is ‘this’?”
He ignored the question. “You said on the phone you’re working for the Governor.”
I nodded. “You realize, of course, that Governor Hoffman is concerned about this investigation of yours.”
“And here I thought I had his blessing.”
“You’ve got his blessing, as I understand it, but he’d like to know what the hell you’re up to. Time is running out for Richard Hauptmann.”
The smile disappeared from around the corncob pipe. “That poor unfortunate son of a bitch. Sitting in the death house waiting to be executed for a crime he’s completely innocent of.”
“I think he’s innocent myself,” I said. “Why do you feel that way?”
“Nathan…mind if I call you Nathan? Nathan, you’re the kidnapper of this baby, you’re the master criminal of this century, you plan the crime of the century and you execute it. If you’re such a genius do you take a piece of wood from your own attic to make a ladder and then leave it behind as a clue?”
“Probably not.”
“Never. Especially not if you’re Hauptmann, who has all kinds of lumber in his garage and his yard. That was contrived evidence, I know that from my friends in the State Police. It’s bullshit.”
“Well, you’re right.”
“Let me ask you something, Nathan. If you had the brains to collect this ransom, would you go to a gas station with your own car, your own face, your own license plate, and give the guy a gold note and add insult to injury and tell him you got more like it at home?”
“I guess not.” I shifted in the hard chair. “No offense, Ellis-you don’t mind if I call you Ellis? Ellis, this is all old news to me. I didn’t drive up here from Washington, D.C., to sit around the pickle barrel and chew the fat.”
His mouth twitched around the pipe. “Do you know that that little corpse found on that mountainside probably wasn’t the Lindbergh baby?”
“I suspect it.”
He sat forward and his jaw jutted like the prow of a ship. “Yes, but do you know it? I’m not talking about the unlikelihood of them bones going undetected when the woods had been searched by everybody from the New Jersey State Police to the Boy Scouts of America. I’m talking about talking to pathologists about the rate of decomposition. I’m talking about looking up the weather records for that region in those three months.”
“Weather records?”
He leaned back, smiling like a fisherman who’d just made a big, easy catch. “Ever build a compost heap, Nathan?”
“I’m a city boy, Ellis. I don’t know shit about compost.”
He laughed. “In a compost heap, even tiny leaves take more than three months to decompose and you’re doin’ everything humanly possible to make ’em decompose faster, you’re adding manure and such to make it break down as quick as you can. And it still takes months. This body they want us to believe was the Lindbergh baby, it decomposed way too fast to have been out there in that cold, cold weather for three months.”
“That’s interesting,” I admitted, and it was. I was even writing it down. “Is that it?”
The sleepy blue eyes woke up. “You’re not impressed, city boy? You want to know what I know that you don’t?”
“Sure.”
“Well,” he said, and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t hook a thumb in his suspenders, “I know who the real kidnapper is.”
“Oh, really. Who?” I pointed to the skeleton in the hat in the chair. “Him?”
“No. This is the feller.” He was searching in the papers on his desk; finally he withdrew a mug shot and passed it to me.
I looked at the front and side views of a bucket-headed man with inexpertly slicked-back gray hair, dark eyebrows, a lumpy drink-dissipated nose, a fleshy face that looked pasty even in a black-and-white photo. His mouth was a crinkly line, a bow tie bumping a saggy double chin. He could have been fifty, he could have been seventy. His eyes had the dull, sullen look of a man who cared about nothing, except maybe himself. I wouldn’t have trusted him for the time.
“His name is Paul H. Wendel,” Parker said. “Known him all his life.”
That didn’t quite seem possible. “How old is he?”
“About forty-two, forty-three, I’d say.”
Jesus. This guy was decomposing faster than the little Sourlands corpse.
“Knew his father before him,” Parker was saying, “knew the boy since he was born. His daddy was a Lutheran minister, and tried to push his son into following in his footsteps. Didn’t take.”
“Looks like he’s been around.”
“He practiced pharmacy at one time. But when he was in that business he perpetrated a holdup against himself to collect the insurance money. He was saving up for night classes. Studying law.”
“Law?”
Parker nodded, grinned around the corncob pipe. “So before you know it, he become a lawyer. And as a young lawyer, he embezzled clients’ funds and was convicted and went to the pokey. Yours truly, as a friend of his old Bible-beating daddy, helped him get a parole. I tried to get him reinstated with the Bar Association but I didn’t pull ’er off.”
I studied Wendel’s battered face. “And you think this guy is the Lindbergh kidnapper?”
“I know he is. The man has a brilliant mind-studied medicine for a while, too, you know. Medicine, the law, the ministry, pharmacy-that’s Paul Wendel.”
“It sounds like you’re…friends.”
“We are, or we were, before he committed this crime. Smartest man I ever met, Paul Wendel, but a failure in so many ways, and bitter about it. He felt that all the things he’d tried to accomplish came to nothing, that nothing good had ever happened to him; that he never got a break.”
“Was this self-pity occasional, like when he was in his cups, or…”
“It was constant. He’d say, The world has always mistreated me, Ellis, but one day I’ll do something that will make the world sit up and take notice.’”
“And you think he finally did.”
Parker’s mouth was tight, but his eyes smiled, as he nodded. “Not long before the kidnapping, Paul was getting himself into trouble writing bad checks. There were warrants out for him in New Jersey. He came to me and asked if I could help, and I said I would try, but in the meantime he should go away someplace.”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Several months before the kidnapping. He began living in New York, in various cheap hotels, but his wife and his daughter and son stayed behind in Trenton-he’d sneak home and visit ’em from time to time, when the coast was clear.”
“It wasn’t like there was a big manhunt out for him.”
“Not at all. He just had warrants on him for this bad paper he passed. Anyway, after the kidnapping, I made a statement to the press and the radio that if the kidnapper would just come forward and talk to me, I would do all in my power to see that he was not punished. All I wanted to do was get that baby back safe.”
“Figuring with your reputation, it might just draw the kidnapper out.”
“Such was my thinking, yes. Hell, pretty soon I had bags of mail, phone calls from here to hell and back. My secretary would screen these calls. She’d only have me listen in on the more promising ones. And one of these calls was from Wendel-trying to disguise his voice.”
“You’re sure it was him?”
“Positive. I know Paul Wendel’s voice, for Christ’s sake; heard it for forty-some years. He calls disguising his voice, and even my secretary recognizes it, so she puts him on the line with me, and he’s saying he knows who has the baby, and he’d like to come in and talk to me about it. I pretended not to recognize who it was, and invited him in.”
“Did he come?”
“Yup. But he didn’t even mention having called. Just announced that he’d had contact with the people who had the Lindbergh baby, and how he wanted to work with me to get that baby back. I told him, why, go ahead; see what you can do. But nothing come of it.”
“Sounds like he was just a blowhard. Maybe trying to pressure you into getting those bad-check warrants pulled off his back.”
“I would’ve thought so, too, but I kept remembering something Wendel had said to me, not long before the kidnapping. He was sitting in this office, in that very chair you’re sitting in, having coffee…oh, do you want some coffee, Nathan?”
“No, that’s okay. I’d rather have the rest of the story…black.”
“Right. Anyway, he said, ‘You know, Ellis, I’m getting damned tired of trying to save some money, a five-dollar bill here, a ten-dollar bill there. I want some real money.’ So I asked him, ‘What do you consider “real” money, Paul?’ And Wendel says, ‘I want to make fifty thousand dollars at one time. Fifty thousand, fifty thousand.’ He kept going on about it.”
“And when you heard about the fifty-thousand-dollar ransom, then you suspected Wendel?”
“When I put it together with his story about having ‘friends’ who had the baby, you bet I did.”
I sighed. “You’ve been reading your own press clippings, Ellis. That’s the thinnest piece of deduction I’ve heard this side of the radio.”
He didn’t like that. He shook the pipe at me. “My instincts have never done me wrong, not in over forty years in this game, you young pup.”
“Really? Well, I’ve been a detective since, what, ’31? And this is the first time I’ve been called a ‘young pup.’”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! And you don’t know Paul Wendel! Remember, he thought the world had mistreated him.” He hunched his shoulders, gesturing with both hands. “This man is a psychotic, a very brilliant man with a criminal twist to his mind. The world was always against him. So what does he decide to do? Strike at the world’s biggest hero. Kidnap the baby of this international hero, this Lucky Lindy. And that way, he could be more famous than Lindy, and yet anonymous at the same time. In his mind, he’d know he was better than Lindbergh; in his mind, he was a bigger hero.”
“If he did this, why would he come to you with this cock-and-bull story about ‘friends’ of his who had the baby? You’re a cop, and a famous one. That’s inviting hell in a handbasket….”
He threw up his hands. “It’s the key, Nathan! Wendel did something that he believes proves he is bigger than Lindbergh. But he couldn’t be a ‘hero,’ and not let somebody know! He can’t be the man who planned and executed the crime of the century and then remain silent about it.”
“And he was acquainted with you, the ‘barnyard Sherlock Holmes,’ a world-famous detective, who could appreciate his accomplishment.”
“Now you’re getting it.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not. And if this is all you have, I don’t think you have much of a suspect at all.”
He snorted. “You think that’s all I have? When my instincts kick in, that’s when I start digging. On this and on any case. So I began investigating my dear old friend. Would you like to hear some of what I discovered?”
“Why not.” The day was shot to hell, anyway.
“For openers, in the weeks before the kidnapping, Wendel was frequenting a candy store in Hopewell, for sweets and cigarettes; I have a deposition to that effect from the female proprietor.”
“Next you’ll tell me Hochmuth and Whited saw him in Hopewell, too.”
“Nathan, this woman does not have cataracts, and she does not live in a hillbilly shack. Here’s another little fact you may enjoy…Wendel’s sister lives in back of St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.”
I blinked. “What?”
“His sister.” He was grinning, but his eyes were dead serious. “St. Raymond’s is where this lying fool Condon paid off the fifty thousand-and Wendel would not have had far to go to hide out afterwards, would he?”
This, too, I wrote down. I was getting interested.
“I’m jumping around a bit, Nathan-hope you can follow me. Now, when Wendel was still a practicing attorney in Trenton, he got one of his clients off on a narcotics rap. You know what that client’s name was, Nathan?”
“Why don’t you tell me, Ellis?”
“Why, sure, Nathan. It was Isidor Fisch.”
I just looked at him; I had about as much to say at that moment as the skeleton.
“With their lawyer-client relationship,” Parker said casually, “I figure maybe Wendel turned the fifty thousand in marked ransom bills over to Fisch, who some people say was a ‘hot-money’ fence.”
I was sitting forward. “Ellis, this may be important. You have my apologies for doubting you.”
“Well, thank you, young man.” He relit the corncob pipe, shook the match out. “Now I’ll tell you about Paul Wendel and Al Capone.”
He was showing off, but it was working. I felt like I’d been poleaxed.
“Al Capone?” I asked. Because it was clear that he wouldn’t continue until I did ask.
He nodded smugly. “Paul Wendel tried to work a confidence game on Al Capone some years ago, around 1929 or ’30. I have an affidavit to that effect from a Frank Cristano, who has had some contact with underworld figures, from time to time. To make a long story short, Wendel convinced both Cristano and Capone that he could turn common tar into alcohol for four cents a gallon. At some point, however, the scam unraveled and Capone said if Wendel-who had come to visit Capone at the Lexington Hotel in your fair city-ever darkened his door again he’d get taken for what I believe you Chicago boys refer to as a ‘ride.’”
“I don’t think that term is unknown on the East Coast, either, Ellis.”
“What’s really interesting, Nathan, is that Wendel approached Cristano again, in early 1932-with a scheme to get Al Capone out of his income-tax troubles by kidnapping-and then arranging for Capone to be a hero by returning-the Lindbergh baby.”
There it was.
I said, “Did this Cristano say he delivered the message?”
“No. He threw Paul Wendel out on his ass. But don’t you suppose Wendel found a way to get that message to Capone?”
I nodded. “So maybe you do have a hell of a suspect in Wendel.”
“I think so.”
“But there isn’t much time to develop any of this. You have him under surveillance, I suppose?”
“Why, Nathan,” Ellis Parker said innocently, removing the corncob pipe. “I have him under wraps over at the local insane asylum. Care to meet him?”