“Sometimes, yes. When they want to. And when I want to keep breathing. I sometimes accommodate them.”
“Bruno Richard Hauptmann is dead.”
“So I hear. What exactly can I do about that at this juncture?”
“Nothing. Nothing.”
“Evalyn. Evalyn, are you crying?”
“Fuck you, Heller! Fuck you, Heller.”
Most women get around to saying that to me, eventually. Even the toney ones.
“I’m sorry, Evalyn. I’m sorry I’m not what you’d like me to be.”
“You still could be. I know you’re a good man, underneath it all.”
“Oh, really? Does that mean the chauffeur’s position is still open?”
“Now you’re being cruel,” she said, and I’d hurt her. I’d meant to, but I was sorry.
I told her so.
The earnestness of her voice would’ve broken my heart, if I’d let it. “Nate, that little boy is out there somewhere…I just know he is. If we can find him, we can clear Richard Hauptmann’s name.”
“A posthumous pardon will leave him just as dead as he is now. Maybe history will clear the poor bastard; but I’m not going to. Besides, I’m not so convinced that kid is alive.”
“I’m going to keep looking, Nate. I’ll never stop.”
“Yes, you will, Evalyn. You’ll find some new cause. There’s always another cause to support, just like there’s always another diamond to buy.”
“You are cruel.”
“Sometimes. But not foolish. Goodbye, Evalyn.”
And I hung up.
I just sat there for a while, and then I slammed my fist on the desk, and the phone jumped, and I split a fucking stitch. It hurt like hell. I unbuttoned my shirt and there was blood on the bandage. I’d have to go back to the hospital for a little outpatient number. God, it hurt. I started to cry.
I cried like a baby for several minutes.
I told myself it was the wound. But there are all kinds of those.
EPILOGUE
42
I never saw Evalyn again.
She continued investigating the case, and wrote a series of articles about her experiences for Liberty magazine in 1938; but eventually her obsession subsided. Her husband died in an insane asylum in 1941. In 1946, Evalyn’s daughter-who shared her mother’s first name-took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up; Evalyn was heartbroken and died, technically of pneumonia, the next year. Sad as that sounds, there was a typically madcap aspect to Evalyn’s last hours: her bedside was surrounded with as many famous friends and relatives as one of her star-studded dinner parties.
Many of the people in the case I never saw again. My uneasy “friendship” with Frank Nitti, on the other hand, continued no matter what I did to try to stop it, until he stopped it himself, with his suicide-under-suspicious-circumstances in 1943.
He and Ricca and Campagna and a few others had just been indicted in the Hollywood movie-union extortion case; the general belief was that Nitti couldn’t face going back to prison. In fact, the recent death of his beloved wife Anna had depressed Nitti, and finally allowed the forceful Ricca to make his move. It was a peaceful overthrow, the force of Ricca’s personality compared to that of the faltering Nitti bringing the Boys over to the Waiter’s side.
Nitti’s suicide was an act of defiance toward Ricca, whose reign as Chicago crime lord began with a prison sentence.
The ruthless Waiter, as Nitti predicted, eventually did learn a lesson about fathers and sons. His own son became a drug addict and Ricca, during his rule, banned the Outfit from narcotics trafficking. Ricca became inclined toward concentrating on victimless crimes, like gambling. He spent his declining years using legal tactics to avoid deportation, and died in his sleep in 1972 at the age of seventy-four.
Capone, of course, never did make his comeback; syphilis caught up with him, and after his stay in Alcatraz, he died a near-vegetable in 1947.
Some of the minor crooks, like Rosner, Spitale and Bitz, I never had contact with again; no idea what became of them. Some of the cops I ran into now and then, of course.
Eliot Ness fought syphilis in a different way from Capone-he was the government’s top vice cop during World War II. But Eliot’s glory days faded in the postwar years, after he lost a mayoral bid in Cleveland, where he’d once been so successful as Director of Public Safety. He died an unsuccessful businessman in 1957, right before his autobiography The Untouchables made him posthumously a legend.
Elmer Irey became the coordinator of the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement agencies, not only the Intelligence Unit but the Secret Service and agents of the Alcohol Tax Unit, Customs, Narcotics Unit and Coast Guard Intelligence. His integrity was unquestioned, and he attacked various investigations regardless of their political implications; because he’d put away Missouri’s political boss Tom Pendergast, he retired in 1946 rather than tangle with the in-coming Truman administration. He died a little over a year later.
Frank J. Wilson did become the head of the Secret Service, later in 1936, and remained such till 1947. His major accomplishment in that office was cracking down on counterfeiters. After retiring he became security consultant for the Atomic Energy Commission. He died in 1970 at age eighty-three.
Schwarzkopf was fired by Governor Hoffman in June of 1936. The ex-floorwalker rebounded in an unexpected way: Phillips H. Lord, the radio producer, hired Schwarzkopf at the same rate as his old state-police salary to be an “official police announcer” on Lord’s famous show Gangbusters. During the same period, Schwarzkopf became a trucking executive in New Jersey; good research for a guy working on Gangbusters, I’d say. Like a number of Lindbergh cronies, Schwarzkopf served in unspecified ways overseas during World War II, in Italy and Germany-possibly in the OSS. Anyway, he became, of all things, the chief of police of Iran for five postwar years; doing more OSS/CIA-type stuff? Who knows.
Ultimately, Schwarzkopf wound up back in New Jersey, heading a newly created law-enforcement agency investigating financial irregularities in state government. Schwarzkopf’s first major investigation was into the Unemployment Compensation Committee, and he soon discovered that the committee’s director had been embezzling. The director’s name? Former Governor Harold Hoffman.
Hoffman, it seemed, had been embezzling for years, starting with a bank he’d been president of in South Amboy long before he became governor. He’d lost his reelection bid in ’37, tried again in ’40 and ’46, losing both times, the Wendel case coming back to haunt him. During World War II, he managed to join the ranks of the many Lindbergh-case colonels, serving in the Army Transport Command.
Harold Hoffinan was a dedicated public servant in many respects, and he threw his career away on Bruno Richard Hauptmann, either because he was gambling on the fame he’d win if he managed to clear the guy; or because he sincerely felt Hauptmann was innocent. He liked wine, women and song, too well apparently, and died in a hotel room in 1954 while under investigation by the man who brought him down-Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf.
Schwarzkopf died in 1958 of a stomach ailment.
The Wendel case also brought Ellis Parker down, of course. He and his “deputies” all went to jail. The new “Lindbergh kidnapping law” got ’em. Both father and son went to the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Parker never changed his tune about Wendel’s guilt, and the Cornfield Sherlock’s supporters were lobbying for a presidential pardon when he died in the prison hospital of a brain tumor in 1940. I hear his son died a few years ago.
Wendel himself had a burst of fame: for one national magazine, he went into a photo studio with actors and posed melodramatic reenactments of the tortures he claimed to have endured. He published a book about his captivity and became something of a celebrity, even a hero. Then he faded into obscurity and I don’t know what the hell became of him.