Brother Fish (45 page)

‘And, of course, with Jimmy alive, circumstances changed.'

‘Well, not quite everything changed. But you're correct in as much as we no longer had murder suspects on our hands.'

‘You said not quite everything changed?'

‘Yes, Frau Kraus stubbornly refused to withdraw her evidence.'

‘Which was that Jimmy was attacked with two baseball bats and beaten unconscious, or, as she claimed, murdered?'

Abe Stennholz smiled. ‘Yes, but as I previously mentioned, my clients strenuously denied this account, saying they'd merely taken the baseball bats they found in their bedroom in order to scare the boy. But, in fact, one of them had punched him in the face, which had caused his nose to bleed. At no time had the bats been used. They pointed out that they were both big men and quite capable of handling a teenage boy without having to beat him senseless with baseball bats.'

‘And this explained the lack of blood on the bats?'

‘Yes, of course.'

‘So you suggested Frau Kraus lied about washing the bats?'

‘Well, it's not unreasonable to suggest that nobody in their right mind would do such an absurd thing.'

‘So, she was either crazy or she was lying?'

Abe smiled. ‘Don't you think if either was the case she would have to be considered . . .' he seemed to be struggling for a word, and finally said, ‘unreliable?'

‘You mean she'd be lying not to
protect
her sons but in order to
harm
them?'

‘Quite right. Not the actions of a mother or someone of sound mind.'

‘Unless of course she
was
telling the truth and truly wanted justice for Jimmy Oldcorn. You said yourself she was obsessed with cleaning. Given this fact, wiping the bats clean was stupid but at least a plausible action, don't you think?'

Abe Stennholz smiled. ‘Mr McKenzie, I was working for the defence, not the prosecution. Now let me ask
you
a question. What if there had been a more compelling reason for doubting the true state of her mind?'

‘What could this possibly be?'

‘Well, for instance, if the Kraus twins had arrived to find the boy in bed with Frau Kraus.'

This, of course, was the claim the sheriff had used to confront Jimmy in hospital, but I didn't let on that I knew about it. ‘But that didn't happen,' I ventured instead.

‘Well, as a matter of fact, when Frau Kraus seemed determined to implicate them, the Kraus twins were finally forced to submit that it did. In an attempt to protect their mother, they'd not revealed the true facts, which were that, upon their arrival home, they'd found her in bed with the Negro boy.'

‘But she would deny this, and so would Jimmy.'

‘There wasn't any Jimmy,' the lawyer reminded me. ‘He'd effectively disappeared.'

At this point, I'm ashamed to say, I lost it again. ‘Disappeared! Is that what you call it? The sheriff frightened the life out of him in hospital, then gave him twenty dollars and instructions to catch the bus to New York or he'd be in serious trouble with the law!' I cried.

Abe Stennholz leaned forward, a look of surprise and annoyance on his face. ‘Oh? That's news to me, Mr McKenzie! Just where did this information come from?'

‘Are you saying that isn't what happened?'

‘Of course I am! There has never been the slightest suggestion that the sheriff did any such thing. The hospital report showed that Jimmy Oldcorn left the premises sometime in the early hours of the morning, and of his own accord.'

I gave him a lopsided grin and shook my head, forced to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the sheriff hadn't informed Abe Stennholz of this essential little detail.

‘The law can only deal with the prevailing facts, Mr McKenzie,' Abe Stennholz now claimed self-righteously.

‘Which left your case very simple. That Frau Kraus was discovered in bed with Jimmy Oldcorn by her sons returning from the war. Acting to protect her honour, they'd “helped” Jimmy on his way. If she denied this is what happened it
could
be taken as yet another instance of her disturbed state of mind. After all, no mother “in her right mind” would protect herself at the cost of her children. But here was a woman who was
prepared
to see her children accused of murder, rather than risk being indicted for corrupting a minor. Is that it?'

‘Well, yes, that seems correct. The court would need to accept her testimony or that of the twins.'

‘And you felt certain her word could be proved to be unreliable? That she had a motive, albeit a misguided one, for seeing that the twins were found guilty?'

Abe Stennholz shrugged. ‘As the defence laywer I was obliged to make the best possible case for my clients. However, I sincerely believed what they told me. It hardly seemed plausible that they'd see the Negro boy off the property simply because Frau Kraus had allowed him to occupy their bedroom. Finding him in bed with her was a much more compelling reason for such an action.'

‘So, in these changed circumstances, chasing Jimmy from the property and sending him away with a bloody nose was a very understandable reaction and could hardly be regarded as a major assault?'

‘That was my contention, Mr McKenzie. I feel no need to apologise for it,' Abe Stennholz said, looking steadfast.

‘What about the Mother General at the Holy Name Hospital? Wasn't she prepared to bear witness that she believed Jimmy had been beaten into a state of unconsciousness? How did you handle that?'

‘Handle what? I had nothing to do with it! Are you suggesting I conspired to . . .'

About to get the lawyer badly off side, I quickly interjected. ‘No, of course not, sir. I meant, what happened with the hospital testimony? Wasn't the Mother General going to testify?'

Abe Stennholz seemed only slightly mollified, but thankfully continued with the interview. ‘In fact, she never appeared in court. As I was told, the doctor who attended to Jimmy when they'd brought him in, as well as the doctors who subsequently looked after him during his stay in hospital, were not prepared to swear that his injuries had been caused by a severe beating. At the time, the police had appealed for anyone witnessing the hit-and-run to come forward, and until Jimmy was able to talk, the medical staff were quite prepared on the evidence presented by his condition to accept that he'd been the victim of a hit-and-run accident. With no reliable eyewitness able to claim the boy had been beaten it was an understandable conclusion. I understood at the time that the public prosecutor decided against using Mother General Black's testimony.'

‘So the case became Kraus versus Kraus? No witnesses, no victim present and no official statement from Jimmy.'

‘Yes, that is correct.'

‘So if you could prove Frau Kraus was an unreliable witness, you were home and hosed?'

‘Home and hosed? I don't understand?'

‘Ah, it's an Australian racing expression – it means it's all over, bar the shouting.'

Abe Stennholz was silent for a few moments, then said softly, ‘We thought, under the circumstances, it was best that Frau Kraus wasn't put through the public humiliation of a trial.'

‘I beg your pardon? I'm not sure I understand.'

Abe Stennholz looked directly at me. ‘Mr McKenzie, I was a lawyer for the defence and was giving my clients the only possible legal advice I could. I also believed I could spare their mother a great deal of public humiliation if she didn't testify at the trial.'

I wasn't sure what he was getting at. ‘Just what advice could you give them that would prevent Frau Kraus giving testimony and at the same time spare her public humiliation?'

‘I advised them to have Frau Kraus examined by a psychiatrist.'

‘Ah, I see. Naturally they accepted your advice?'

‘Yes. As I guessed might be the case, the psychiatrist found that she suffered from delusions and acute paranoia.'

‘These delusions, what were they? The blood on the baseball bats?'

‘No, no. She was clearly disorientated and kept claiming she'd murdered her husband and that she'd also murdered the Negro boy. That his death was her fault for letting him stay in the house.'

‘And the paranoia?'

‘When the psychiatrist told her that Jimmy was alive, she refused to believe him and demanded to see him for herself.'

‘Which, under the circumstances, wasn't unreasonable.'

‘But impossible. The psychiatrist suggested she should be placed in a clinic and, in his opinion, her testimony would not have been reliable. We submitted his findings to the court, where the judge ordered a second opinion. The court appointed a psychiatrist from the State Mental Institution at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, Morris Plains.'

‘Let me guess – he agreed with his colleague in private practice?'

‘Yes, but not until he'd closely examined her past behaviour and all the circumstances leading up to the Negro boy being chased from the Kraus farm. Then there was the fact that Frau Kraus still persisted with claiming she'd murdered her husband and was responsible for the boy's death. Abe Stennholz paused and then asked me, ‘Do you know the circumstances of Otto Kraus's death?'

‘Only that he died on the way to the internment camp,' I lied, again not wishing to reveal to him that I knew the complete story.

‘Yes, well, he'd been incarcerated in the county jail for some time before the train journey to the internment camp. In the confusion at the time, what with war having been declared, there wasn't an official post mortem or coroner's inquiry into his death. But the military doctor who examined him came to the conclusion that he'd committed suicide, as a blood analysis after he died showed traces of arsenic poisoning in his system. The point being that Frau Kraus quite obviously had nothing to do with his death. She also confessed to an intense dislike of her sons, supporting their own evidence of her complete and early rejection of them in childhood. Finally, the Lutheran minister who attended the . . .'

‘Your brother, wasn't it?' I interjected.

Abe Stennholz didn't miss a beat, completely ignoring my remark. ‘. . . funeral of her husband, Otto Kraus, told how she'd placed a crude black paper rose on his grave, whereupon she'd spat onto the casket and announced, ‘
Danke, meine saubere Frau
,' after which she'd laughed hysterically, so that he was forced to slap her to calm her down. This, taken along with the further evidence from several members of her church congregation of her strange or erratic behaviour in their presence, all added up to a profile of someone who was mentally disturbed.'

‘So Frau Kraus wasn't present at the trial. I take it the twins agreed to have her committed to a clinic for treatment.'

‘No, she was admitted to Greystone Park.'

‘Why not a clinic?' I asked.

‘The Kraus twins had her examined a third time by a forensic psychiatrist who told them there was no possibility that she'd recover, even with electric-shock treatment. Greystone Park was the logical recommendation.'

‘Putting her away for keeps.'

Abe Stennholz didn't reply.

I've subsequently done a little research on Greystone Park Hospital, one of the very few mental institutions in New Jersey at the time. In 1945, the year Frau Kraus entered this notorious place, the inmate population exceeded 5000! Frau Kraus would simply have disappeared into this bedlam, never to surface again.

‘With nobody to testify for the prosecution, did any trial eventuate?' I asked.

Abe Stennholz gave me an indignant look. ‘Of course – my clients had wilfully attacked a minor, there was no getting away from that.'

‘And the judge's verdict?'

‘You think it was a conspiracy, don't you, Mr McKenzie?'

‘Well, sir, you have to admit, everything seems to have fallen very neatly into place for the Kraus twins.'

‘You could say so, but there was additional evidence to suggest they were telling the truth.'

‘Oh?'

‘Sheriff Waterman sent the two baseball bats in for forensic examination. Blood, as you may know, is very difficult to eliminate and they did find a very small trace.'

‘Ah! They then tested it against Jimmy's blood group? The hospital would have known what that was.'

‘Of course. The blood trace they found was well into the grain of one of the bats, high up on the grip, and it didn't match the Negro boy's. In fact, it turned out to belong to Fritz Kraus. At some time in the past he must have received a crack on the hand from a baseball that had caused him to bleed.'

‘What about the back of the truck? If, as you say, blood is difficult to eliminate, would there not have been traces of blood there as well?'

‘Unfortunately, the truck had been steam cleaned. This was easily enough explained. As any nurseryman will tell you, tomato plants need to be transported in a very clean environment so as not to pick up diseases. But they did find a trace of blood that matched the Negro boy's blood group. This was put down to him having suffered a haemorrhage from the nose, explained by the nosebleed the twins had admitted giving him.'