Almost all of it. There was one question, a rather key question, I wasn’t asked by the slick Wilentz.
“Buy you lunch, Nate?” Slim asked, and I said sure, as we exited the courtroom for the noon break; we both had to damn near shout, because the courtroom was still buzzing.
“Union Hotel dining room okay?” Lindy asked, breath smoking in the chill air, as we pushed through a crowd that was cheering and clapping at the sight of the Lone Eagle; newsreel cameras churned and reporters called out questions-none of it registering on Slim, who carried around with him his own quiet at the center of the storm.
“Hotel dining room’s swell,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Right there,” he said, nodding across the way. “That’s where you’re staying.”
We moved through the car-choked street; onlookers called out to Lindy who at times bestowed them a tight glazed smile, and very occasionally a nod. He seemed oblivious to the grisly goods being hawked, the little ladders and such; but he couldn’t have been.
The Union Hotel was a lumbering red-brick affair with ugly gingerbread work detailing a sprawling porch over which lurked double-deck balconies. Out front a chalk sandwich board listed the fare in the dining room: Lamp Chops Jafsie, Baked Beans Wilentz, Lindbergh Sundaes, among others.
The dining room was bustling, but a few tables were reserved for celebrities like Slim and the prosecution and defense teams. Colonel Breckinridge, who hadn’t made it into the courtroom, was waiting for us at an isolated table off to one side.
As we sat down, Breckinridge asked Lindbergh how the trial was going today, and he said, “Fine.”
I said, “Reilly strikes me as the prosecution’s biggest asset.”
“How so?” Breckinridge asked.
“Well, that swallowtail coat and spats getup isn’t exactly endearing him to that down-home jury. Or his loud, bullying style. He’s about as subtle as John Barrymore half-in-the-bag.”
A waiter handed us menus and Lindbergh examined his with unblinking eyes, his expression not unlike the one the defendant had been wearing in court.
The middle-aged, potbellied waiter, though busy, stood attentively by while we read the menu and ordered at leisure; Lindbergh wasn’t just any customer, after all.
“What are the ‘Hauptmann Fries’?” I asked him.
“German fried potatoes,” he said blandly.
Lindbergh ordered vegetable soup and a hard roll; Breckinridge had the Lamb Chops Jafsie; and I had the Gow Goulash (named for Betty, the nurse, who’d come from Scotland to testify a few days before).
While we waited for our lunches, I said, “I notice Wilentz didn’t ask me about that suspicious guy I saw walk by Jafsie and me, at the cemetery.”
“Oh?” Breckinridge said.
Lindy said nothing.
“Must not fit his no-conspiracy thesis,” I said. “Slim, did he ask you about the guy you saw?”
“What guy?” Slim asked.
“The guy you saw on your cemetery jaunt. Could’ve been the same guy I saw on mine.”
Lindbergh shrugged.
“Come on, Slim-it probably was the guy I saw. Walked by with a stoop, covering his face with a hanky, swarthy fella?”
“Just some bystander,” he said.
“Oh, it’s just a coincidence, we both saw, on our two separate trips, at our two separate cemeteries, a stooped-over wop covering his face with a hanky, while he walked by checking us out? Slim. Please.”
Lindbergh said, rather tightly, “Let Wilentz do his job.”
I sat forward; silverware clinked. “Why didn’t Wilentz ask me anything about my real role in the case? There was nothing about Capone, or Marinelli and Sivella mentioning the name ‘Jafsie’ before Condon was on the scene, or Curtis or Means or…”
“That is not,” he said crisply, “the focus of this trial. Let it go.”
“Let it go? Maybe Reilly won’t let it go, Slim.”
His mouth twitched irritably. “Just use common sense on the stand, Nate. All right?”
“Common sense?”
Our food arrived; I waited till everybody was served and the waiter was gone. The Gow Goulash looked tomatoey and was steaming hot and smelled good.
“Common sense,” I repeated. “You mean, lie on the stand?”
Lindbergh glared at me, but said nothing.
Breckinridge said, “No one is suggesting that, Heller, certainly.”
I took a bite of the goulash; it tasted as good as it looked. Damn near as good as Betty Gow looked, for that matter.
“You know, gents,” I said reflectively, “I’m from Chicago, and in many respects I’m your typical low-life greedy Chicago cop. Of course I’m private now, and part of why I left the department is that some people assumed I was for sale at any price. I’m not.”
“No one is suggesting…” Breckinridge began, nervously.
“There’s a lot of things I’ll do for money, or even just the hell of it. But I make it a point not to lie on witness stands.”
Lindbergh was looking at his soup as he spooned it; eating quickly, for him.
“You remember that gun I loaned you, Slim? The one you took to the cemetery that night?”
He nodded, but he didn’t look at me.
“I lied on the witness stand, once. The cops and the mob had a patsy picked out. It was even okay with the patsy-he was in on the fix. I didn’t see the harm of going along with it. So I lied on the witness stand.”
Lindbergh touched his lips with a napkin.
“It got me ahead,” I said, shrugging. “It’s how I got to be the youngest plainclothes officer on the goddamn Chicago police. But it rubbed my father the wrong way. Old union guy that he was. Stuffy about things like that, like telling the truth under oath. Funny-he didn’t even believe in God, yet if they put him under oath, he couldn’t have told anything but the truth. Anyway. That gun I loaned you, he killed himself with it. My gun. Since then, I’ve been fussy about what I say on witness stands.”
Slim said, “I’m sorry about your father.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“I know what your point is. I don’t appreciate being called a liar.”
“Is that what I did?”
He looked at me hard; sighed. “Nate, this man is guilty.”
“I heard you say you couldn’t identify ‘Cemetery John’ by his voice. You told the same thing to a Bronx grand jury, not so long ago. What changed?”
He gestured with a pointing finger. “I have been assured by the top police officials in this case that there is no doubt about Hauptmann’s guilt. I have heard this from Schwarzkopf, from Frank J. Wilson, from Lt. Finn, from…” He shook his head, as if clearing cobwebs. “If you were able to sit in that courtroom every day, as I have, and as I will, you’d find that out.”
“Slim, I was a cop. I am a cop. And I can tell you one thing about cops: once a cop decides a guy is guilty, that guy is guilty. And a cop will, at that juncture, get real inventive. More tampered-with and manufactured evidence, and coached and purchased witness testimony, has been presented in American courtrooms than any other kind. Trust me.”
“I wish you would, Nate.”
“What?”
“Trust me.”
“Well.” I smiled; dabbed my own face with a napkin. “I will let you buy me lunch. I’m not that proud.”
We smiled at each other, warily, Slim and I, but Breckinridge was disturbed by all this.
After lunch I was called back on the stand and Reilly had at me. I thought, for a moment, he was getting to the heart of it.
He was asking me, in his high-handed ham-actor fashion, about the night we prepared the replica ballot box of ransom money for Jafsie and Slim to deliver to Cemetery John.
“Didn’t you think it would be a good idea to go along and capture that person?”