Part 29

"The cheapest the two of you could do it, third class, would be about seven hundred dollars. Where do you have your bank account?"

"No. No bank account," his wife interrupted sharply.

"All the money is kept here, right here in this house," he laughed.

"You saved all that money in cash?"

"Yes; in cash, right here."

"No banks?"

"We like it better like that--in cash."

Boldt, like Dieckhoff, had been a marine engineer on the North German Lloyd. He went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1931. When the cruiser "Honolulu" made its trial run in the spring of 1938, Boldt was on board.

Like Dieckhoff and Boldt, Harry Woulters, alias Hugo Woulters, the third of the three subpoenaed men, is a naturalized citizen of German extraction. He went to work in the Navy Yard within one day of Dieckhoff. Before that, both had worked on the same four American destroyers at the Staten Island Shipbuilding Company.

The house where Woulters lives has a great many Jews in it, judging from the names on the letterboxes, and since Hugo sounded too German, he listed his first name as "Harry."

"You and Dieckhoff worked on the same destroyers on Staten Island and you say you never met him there?" I asked.

"No, I never met him until the second day after I went to work in the Navy Yard."

"How many people work on a destroyer--a thousand?"

"Oh, no. Not that many."

"About one hundred?"

"About that," he said uncertainly.

"And you worked with Dieckhoff for six months on the same warships and never met him?"

"Yes," he insisted.

"How come that if you never met him both of you applied for jobs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard at about the same time?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know. It's funny. Sounds funny, anyway."

"When you worked on the cruiser 'Honolulu' you handled blueprints?"

"Yes, of course, but they were never left in my possession overnight," he added quickly. I couldn't help but think that Dieckhoff, too, had been very quick in protesting that the blueprints had never been left in his possession overnight. They seemed worried about that even though I had not said anything about it.

"Were they ever left in your possession overnight?"

"No. They guarded the blueprints--"

"My information is that they were left in your possession."

"Wells, sometimes--blueprints--you know, when you work from blueprints sometimes, yes, sometimes blueprints were left in my possession overnight. I was working on reduction gears on the cruiser 'Brooklyn' and I kept the blueprints overnight."

"How often?"

"I can't remember how often. Sometimes the blueprints were kept overnight in my tool box."