“Not at all,” Curtis said, reasonably, and as I found a seat, he finally sat, too. Breckinridge and I had already exchanged small smiles and nods of greeting; the gray, loyal attorney and I had come to share a measure of respect and even friendship.
“Several weeks ago,” Curtis said, fixing his steady gaze on me, “I was approached again by ‘Sam’-that rumrunning, fleeting acquaintance of mine, whose ‘fishing smack’ I repaired once or twice….”
“I don’t remember you describing ‘Sam’ in much detail,” I said, noncommittally.
“Well, he’s a big, lumbering individual…usually wears flashy clothes, like some gangster in a moving picture. He’s decidedly Jewish in appearance, his English broken.”
Being half-Jew myself, I wondered how anybody’s appearance could be “decidedly Jewish,” but I decided to let it pass.
“At any rate,” Curtis continued, “he called me, several weeks ago, and asked if I could meet with him in Manhattan, the next day. With some urgency in his voice, he suggested we meet at a cafeteria near Forty-First Street, at one A.M. Sunday morning.”
Admiral Burrage had arranged for a Navy pilot to fly Curtis to New York, where he checked in at the Governor Clinton Hotel under an assumed name.
“I walked uptown, in the middle of the night, to the cafeteria. Only one side of the room was in use, porters already at work cleaning the other side for the early morning trade. Chairs were piled high, the floor was being swabbed.”
“Commodore,” I said. I was tiring of people who savored melodrama. “Could you get to the point?”
“Detective Heller, I found only one other customer in the cafeteria: Sam, who was sitting at the very last table eating a plate of wheat cakes with some relish.”
Pickle relish, maybe. God, these people.
“Sam claimed the boy was with a German nurse-that he himself had never seen the child. But that he could get her, the nurse, to write out a description for me to give the Colonel. I told him that that was okay, but that I wanted proof, personally, for my own satisfaction, that his crowd really stole the child.”
“And what,” I asked, “did Sam say to that?”
Curtis smiled. “He offered to take me to meet the rest of his gang-to which I immediately said, ‘Let’s go, then!’ But he made me wait two more days-and the night of the second day we met again. I was told to follow Sam’s vehicle through the Holland Tunnel…then to the Hudson-Manhattan train station in Newark. And that was where I came face-to-face with the four men who, if they’re to be believed, masterminded this kidnapping.”
Well, the melodrama of that did have some effect, even on me.
“They were waiting there, on the train platform. No one else was around; the lighting was minimal. One of the men I’d seen before, in the Norfolk shipyard, though this was the first I’d heard his name: George Olaf Larsen. He’s in his early forties, medium height, drab-colored hair combed straight back from his forehead. Sam always addresses him as ‘boss.’”
The second man, Curtis said, was introduced simply as Nils-a Scandinavian in his early thirties, blond, with a florid complexion. The third man was called Eric, another blond but in his mid-forties.
The fourth man was named John.
“He’s a handsome man,” Curtis said, “with the physique of a physical culturist. From his accent, I’d say he was either Norwegian or Dutch.”
I glanced significantly at Lindbergh and then at Breckinridge; Lindy flicked an eyebrow up, while Breckinridge maintained a lawyer’s poker face.
But we all knew the same thing: while a New York Times reporter had, last week, identified Professor Condon as “Jafsie,” and Jafsie as the Lindbergh ransom negotiator, the story of “Cemetery John” was not yet public knowledge.
All five of the gang had piled into Curtis’s car and headed for Larsen’s house in Cape May, at the southern tip of New Jersey.
“Along the way, John said, ‘Sam, he says you want some proof we do this job.’” Curtis was imitating the man’s Norwegian accent; it was pretty hammy. “‘Suppose I tell you exactly how we do it. One night, about one month before kidnapping, I go to some party with a girl friend of mine, a German trained nurse, at roadhouse outside Trenton.’”
The cadence reminded me a bit of the ransom notes Lindbergh and Condon had received.
“‘At roadhouse I meet a member of Lindbergh and Morrow household,’” Curtis continued, still mimicking “John.” Then he interrupted himself to say: “John didn’t say which servant. But he said he recruited this person-he wasn’t even specific about the gender-and promised ‘plenty good money for the trouble.’”
“My servants,” Lindy broke in, rather coldly, “are above suspicion.”
I bit my tongue; I wondered idly how Schwarzkopf and Inspector Welch were faring with the Means tip about Violet Sharpe-which Curtis seemed to be substantiating.
“I’m just telling you what I was told,” Curtis said, quietly defensive. “John’s story was interrupted by our arrival at the Cape May cottage. A woman named Hilda-identified as Larsen’s wife-met us and led us into a brightly lit dining room. We sat around a table, and John finished his story.”
The night of the kidnapping, Nils, Eric, the German nurse and John had driven a green Hudson sedan and parked three hundred feet or so away from Featherbed Lane. Sam had followed in another car, and parked farther away still, on a high spot near the main road, where he could signal if another car pulled into the lane. Nils and John, with a three-sectioned ladder, went to the nursery window. They climbed through the window, with a blanket, a rag and some chloroform. Because the ladder was so unsteady, they exited with their human parcel via the front door.
“The front door?” I asked.
“They knew the layout of the house,” Curtis explained. “They showed me a map, a huge floor plan, which judging from my two visits here would seem to tally. They knew how to lock the pantry door, to keep everyone in the kitchen and the servants’ quarters away from the front hall, if anybody heard anything. There was a key on a nail for them to use-the servant they bribed had told them where to find it.”
I looked at Slim.
“That key does exist,” Lindbergh admitted.
Curtis said, “They had a letter for Colonel Lindbergh, describing the child. I didn’t read it, but I saw it-it seemed to be sort of half-printed, half-written.”
The notes Lindbergh and Jafsie received did mingle printing with cursive, somewhat.
“I was of course ecstatic that they’d finally provided the proof of identification the Colonel sought. And I suggested that one of them accompany me, that very moment, here to Hopewell, to present the letter to Colonel Lindbergh.”
“But they refused,” I said.
“Quite the contrary,” Curtis said. “Larsen went with me. We drove through the night. At Trenton, the next morning, first thing, I attempted to call Colonel Lindbergh, and finally did get through to him, but was unable to arrange the meeting-the Colonel had a pressing engagement.”
I glanced at Lindbergh, finding it hard to believe that he’d decline a chance to meet with Curtis and someone who claimed to be one of the kidnappers.
Lindbergh shrugged. “That was the day you and I went out in the Lockheed-Vega, Nate.”
The second day of searching for the “boad” Nelly. No wonder Curtis and his possible kidnapper fell through the cracks.
“Larsen was pretty jumpy,” Curtis said. “He insisted I drive him back.”
“What about the letter,” I asked, “with the physical description of the kid?”
“He wouldn’t hand it over to me; he hung onto it.”
“Why in hell?”
“He was angry with Colonel Lindbergh, and suspicious.”
“Have you had any contact with Sam or John and company, since?”
He nodded. “Yes. There has been one subsequent meeting.”
After the papers had been filled with lists of serial numbers and speculative stories about “Jafsie,” Curtis was contacted by Sam for another meeting at the Newark train station. He found all of the self-proclaimed kidnappers but Larsen squeezed into Sam’s car, and was told to join them. He did, and was driven to a three-story house in the Scandinavian section of Newark. In a small, sloppy one-flat serving as a bedroom, dining room and sitting room, the men found chairs and Curtis asked John about Jafsie.