Stolen Away (19 page)

I smiled politely.

She laughed a little, sighed. “Vinson liked my red Mercedes almost as much. Used to wear racing goggles when he drove it, and he could make that car deliver all the speed it had in it. I was with him when…when the tire blew. It was like a pistol shot. We were going down the grade toward Honeyman’s Hill, toward the creek, and went right through the side of the bridge. I nearly drowned. I’m still something of a cripple…one leg shorter than the other.” She shook her head. “He did love to race.”

I didn’t know what to say; so I didn’t say anything.

She looked at me with eyes that were deeply blue, in several senses. “So—I named my first son after Vinson. It seemed a good way to keep my brother alive, after a fashion. My Vinson was born in this house. Immediately the newspapers began calling him the ‘hundred-million-dollar baby.’ Even the
Post
—our own paper.”

This was all vaguely familiar to me. “Didn’t he have a solid gold crib?”

“It wasn’t solid gold at all,” she said, crankily. “It was a present to Vinson from our good friend, King Leopold. Of Belgium?”

“Oh. That King Leopold.”

“A handsome and generous gift, but it was just gold plating…yet the reporters made it out to be the crib of Baby Midas. That was when the notes began.”

“Notes?”

She waved her cigarette-in-hand in the air, impatiently, smoke curling. “Letters, telegrams, even anonymous phone calls despite our unlisted number, from criminals willing to accept the ‘golden crib’ as payment for not kidnapping my baby.”

“Oh.”

She shook her head. “Little Vinson couldn’t lead a normal life; he was virtually imprisoned. We had an electric fence, and armed guards patrolling the grounds. Even so, with all of that, an intruder sneaked past the guards and placed a ladder at the nursery window—just as at the Lindberghs’ estate—and was working on the heavy metal screen with wire-cutters when Vinson’s nurse spotted him and screamed.”

“Did your men get the guy?”

“No. They fired shots in the air, and he scurried off into the night. Left a ladder, some footprints, untraceable. This kind of thing went on for years. Kidnap threats on their part, increased security on ours. Finally it ended.”

“How?”

She looked toward the street. “Ned and I were away. At the Kentucky Derby, at Churchill Downs. You know, I had a premonition…or at least a sense of foreboding. It’s a peculiar sensitivity; I can’t define it, really. But from time to time, I feel I know that death impends. I thought it was my
own
death—and at the hotel I wrote Vinson a long letter, telling him how much I adored him.”

“What happened?”

“One of the servants, a valet, was looking after Vinson that morning. Sunday morning. Vinson crossed the street, to talk to a friend; they began playing tag, the two boys, and Vinson was dodging his friend, and he stepped in the path of a tin lizzie. The funny thing was, the lizzie was going at a slow pace, I’m told. Did little more than push Vinson so that he fell down. The driver braked, didn’t run over him. Vinson seemed not badly hurt, at all.”

“You don’t have to go on, Mrs. McLean.”

She was still looking at the street; a single tear ran down her powdered cheek, glimmering like a jewel. “They picked him up and brushed the dust from his clothes. The doctors said there was nothing to be done—as long as there’d been no internal injury, he should prove none the worse for wear. But a few hours later my boy became paralyzed. And at six o’clock Sunday night, with me still away, he died. He was eight years old. He never saw the letter I wrote.”

I didn’t offer my sympathy; it was too small a bandage for so deep and old a wound.

She turned her head away from the street and looked at me and smiled tightly, politely. She didn’t wipe the tear away—she was proud of it, like all her jewels. “That, Mr. Heller, is why I am interested in helping the Lindberghs. As much pleasure as I’ve had giving various functions, or buying baubles, or contributing to charity, I tell you it’s meaningless, it’s empty, compared to the inner satisfaction I will feel if I can restore that baby to its mother’s arms.”

She sounded damn near as silly as Professor Condon; but it hit me a different way. Maybe she was a spoiled, pampered society woman and about as deep as a teacup; but she was acting out of her own pain, and that touched even a jaded cynic like yours truly. Even if this image she had of herself was silly-ass ridiculous—appearing out of the mist with the baby in her arms, presenting it to its mother, like something out of the last reel of an old D. W. Griffith silent—it was obvious she had a good heart.

She lit up another cigarette with the decorative silver lighter. “Do you believe in curses, Mr. Heller?”

“I believe in tangible things, Mrs. McLean. If you mean, do I think your son died because you own the Hope diamond, no. At least not in the way you mean.”

“Well, in what way, then?”

“Only somebody as rich as you could afford that diamond, and could attract the publicity that would go with it, gold baby cribs and so on.”

“Which attracts the attention of the underworld.”

“Something like that.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know—perhaps the stone
is
‘evil.’ I had it blessed by a priest, and I like to think it’s brought me good luck. I’ve had some of that, too, you know.”

“You’ve got it better than some people I know.”

“They say that three hundred years ago the blue diamond was stolen from the eye of an idol in India. Marie Antoinette wore it as a necklace…and it was stolen in the aftermath of the revolution.”

“Well, once she was guillotined, Marie would’ve had a hell of a time keeping the thing on, anyway.”

She laughed; the first time. A good laugh, full-throated and as rich as she was. “Legend has it you’re not supposed to even touch the thing. I don’t encourage my friends to handle it, and for years I kept it away from my children.”

“That sounds like you do take the curse seriously.”

“But I don’t really. Hell, I’ve grown casual with it. I do love the silly thingamabob. I wear it almost all the time.”

“I don’t see it now.”

“Don’t you? Haven’t you noticed? Mike’s wearing it today.”

The Great Dane lifted his head at the sound of his name and looked at me like I was the dumbest shit on the planet. He had a right to feel highfalutin, for a hound, considering the simple necklace of “rhinestones” looped around his stiff collar bore the most famous diamond in the world, an indigo blue stone, in a diamond setting, about the size of a golf ball. It winked at me.

So did Mrs. McLean.

“Stay for dinner, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, “we’ll have drinks and talk of Gaston Means and kidnappers and ransom money, afterward.”

The butler, Garboni, showed me to my room, so I could freshen up before supper. It seemed I was staying overnight.

“People may talk,” Mrs. McLean had said, as we exited the sun porch, taking my arm rather formally, as if she were attired in the latest Hattie Carnegie creation and not a housecoat, “but hell, let them. I hardly think with a staff of twenty, and sixty rooms, I need worry about you compromising what little remains of my virtue.”

“Like the white slaver said to the schoolgirl, you can trust me, Mrs. McLean.”

She smiled at that. “You’ll be staying in Vinson’s room. It’s been kept just the same, since his death.”

“You’ve put me in your son’s room?”

“No. My brother’s. My son’s room has been preserved, as well. It’s a luxury of a house this size. But I never allow anyone to sleep there.”

Brother Vinson’s room, my room, was on the third floor—and we, the butler and me, went by elevator. I tried to remember when I’d ever been in a private residence that had elevators before, and couldn’t. The hallway Garboni led me down was wide enough to accommodate an el train and still take passengers on from either side. Persian rugs underfoot, brocade wallpaper surrounding me, I gaped like a rube at oil paintings and watercolors that looked European and venerable in their elaborate gilt-edged frames, noting my slack-jawed expression in the mirror of dark-wood furniture that was polished past absurdity. I felt about as at home as an archbishop in a brothel; but like the archbishop, I could adjust.

Garboni opened the door to Vinson’s room—actually, it was a suite of rooms—and we entered a sitting room a little smaller than the deck of the
Titanic.
The butler dropped my traveling bag with a clunk.

“Take it easy, pal,” I said irritably. “There’s a gun in there.”

His eyes flared a little bit; that threw him. “Sorry, sir.”

“And here I was getting ready to give you a nickel tip.”

He took that at face value, or seemed to. “No gratuities are necessary, sir.”

“I’ll say. Scram.”

He scrammed; without a word, without even a nasty look. For a burly-looking wop, this bird was pretty easily spooked.

And so I was alone in Vinson’s digs. Sort of.

Just me and the stuffed alligator. And the two sets of armor. And the waist-high ivory elephant. And the six-foot bronze horse. I sat on a plush red couch with a half dozen red pillows, the sort of thing you might find yourself sitting on in a San Francisco whorehouse, and took in the goddamnedest, godawfulest assembly of mismatched junk I ever saw. A Navajo blanket covering a table; an oversize anchor clock on the wall; a portrait of a Madonna and Child; a Hindu bust; a combined bookcase and gun case; seven pieces of old armor on the wall and a shield, too; a carved bellows; several red throw rugs; a slinky-looking sofa that looked like something a Turkish harem girl might lounge on. Vinson might’ve been dead, but his bad taste lived on.

The bedroom itself was almost spartan in comparison—a bookcase filled with Horatio Alger, a cabinet with mirror, a single bed of rough rustic wood that seemed a relic or reminder or something of Colorado.

I used the bathroom—I had my own private one, no bigger than your average Chicago two-flat—and, as Mrs. McLean requested, freshened up. As I splashed water on my face, I wondered what to make of this—specifically, of her. She seemed silly but smart; self-absorbed but caring. A vain rich woman in a 98-cent housecoat.

I didn’t like her exactly—but she fascinated me. And she was attractive; probably ten or fifteen years older than me, but what the hell—older women try harder. Even wealthy ones. Especially wealthy ones.

The room had its own phone, which would allow me to check in with Lindbergh and Breckinridge at my convenience. On the other hand, I could be listened in on, so I’d edit whatever I said with Mrs. McLean in mind.

Freshened or not, I wore the same suit down to dinner—I only had two along; in fact, I only owned two—and, for fifteen minutes or so, sat alone under a cut crystal chandelier at a table for twenty-four, at which there were two place settings, directly opposite each other, midway. I was served a thin white wine that the thin black server, who was dressed far more formally than I, informed me was a Montrachet, as if I should have been impressed, which I wasn’t. He should have known better than to try to impress a guy who had a stuffed alligator in his room.

Mrs. McLean’s entrance, however, did impress. She had traded in the dowdy plaid robe for an embroidered gown, its delicate lacework dark red against a soft pink that at first seemed to be her flesh; but her flesh was whiter, creamier, as was attested to by the low cut of the gown, the white swell of her breasts, and they were indeed swell, providing a resting place for a string of perfect pearls so long it fell off the cliff of her breasts and dropped to her lap. There were worse places to fall from and to. She’d relieved Mike of the Hope diamond, which was around her own neck now, dangling just above the cleft of her bosom. In her hair was a feathered diamond tiara and her earrings were pearls that dwarfed the ballbearing-size ones of the necklace.

Her smile was amused and pleased. “I told you I could dazzle, if I chose.”

“You look great,” I said, lamely, getting up.

She gestured for me to sit and soon we were enjoying her chef’s filet of lemon sole (“with Marguery sauce”).

“Maurice,” she said, referring to her chef, “is the most priceless gem in this house.”

“I hope he doesn’t come with a curse.”

“No,” she said, smiling a little, more relaxed now despite her more formal attire, “just with the pedigree of the best cafés in Paris and London. He trained as a caterer. That’s the only sort of chef to go after.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. I suppose tartar sauce is out of the question.”

She laughed; I was glad she was finally getting my jokes—too bad I hadn’t been joking.

“You know,” she said, reflecting a while later over Maurice’s “patented” parfait, “money is lovely to have and I do love having it—but it doesn’t really bring the big things of life. Friends, health, respect. And it’s apt to make one soft, selfish, self-indulgent.”

“You mean, while we’re eating parfaits in this palace, people are out there scrounging for scraps, living in shacks made out of tin cans and cardboard.”

She nodded, sadly, even as she tasted a bite of parfait. “If only I’d had the courage, years ago, to lead my own life…apart from Ned and his family and my parents and my family…I might by now have helped so many poor souls…. I might have done infinitely more good with my life.”

She licked ice cream from her lips as she shook her head regretfully.

“Well, you are trying to do some good,” I said. “For the Lindberghs and their boy.”

“Yes. In my small way. If you’re finished, Mr. Heller, we can move to the sitting room, and I’ll explain everything.”

I took her by the arm and we moved through that excessive, magnificent house through the Louis XV ballroom, not to the sun porch this time, but to a room nearly as large as the ballroom where plush comfortable furnishings crouched in the golden glow of a massive marble fireplace.

“I’ve had two glasses of wine already,” Mrs. McLean said, standing at a liquor cart about the size of a Maxwell Street pushcart, only mahogany and gold-inlaid. “That is my limit. But if you’d like more…”

“No, that’s fine,” I said, settling down into an oversize sofa opposite the glowing fire. This modest little drawing room was paneled in mahogany, had a twenty-foot ceiling, a massive pipe organ built into one wall, and a Persian rug smaller than Lake Michigan partially covering its parquet floor.

She sat next to me, pulled up an ottoman, kicked off her shoes and put her silk-stockinged feet up on it. A thick arch support tumbled out of her right shoe. She noticed me noticing that and tugged on my arm and pointed to her tiny feet; she wiggled the toes of her right foot.

“See,” she said. “Shorter. From that accident, years ago. I told you.”

“They look fine to me.”

“Mr. Heller, you’re a charming man.”

“Everybody says so. Why don’t you break your rule and let me get us a couple of drinks.”

Her smile was impish. “Why don’t I?”

I poured myself some Bacardi, no ice, and some sherry for her.

“Thank you, Mr. Heller,” she said, sipping hers.

“Why don’t you call me Nate?”

“Why don’t I? Why don’t you call me Evalyn?”

“Why don’t I. And why don’t you tell me all about Gaston Bullock Means.”

“All right.” Her lovely features were serene in the firelight; she was looking into the flames, held by them, as she spoke. “As I said, from the beginning I felt the Lindbergh kidnapping was an underworld job. But I could hardly offer myself as an intermediary—what self-respecting criminal would deal with a flighty society woman like Evalyn Walsh McLean! Besides—they say it takes a crook to catch a crook—and Gaston Bullock Means was the perfect crook for what I had in mind.”

“What made Means the ‘perfect crook’ for the job?”

She raised an eyebrow, sipped her sherry. “I knew he’d done a lot of dirty work for the Harding administration—he certainly knew his way around the capital, from the back alleys to the front parlors.”

“He did time, didn’t he?”

She nodded. “Until recently, he was in the federal penitentiary at Atlanta, on prohibition charges, stemming from abuses when he was a Justice Department agent.”

“Taking bribes from bootleggers?”

“That’s right. Anyway, I first met him several years ago, when some friends of ours in the administration were reluctant to contact Means directly about some documents he’d pilfered. They seemed in mortal fear of the barrel-bellied blackguard. So I called him up, arranged a meeting and picked the papers up from him, myself—as a favor.”

Evalyn Walsh McLean seemed an unlikely bagman for the Ohio Gang; but there it was.

“At our meeting,” she said, with a self-satisfied smirk, “Means made some threatening remarks about several friends of Ned’s and mine—Andrew Mellon, Harry Daughtery—and I put him in his place.”

Andrew Mellon was then Secretary of the Treasury; Daughtery had been Harding’s Attorney General.

“How did you do that, Evalyn?”

She shrugged, but her nonchalance wasn’t convincing. “I told Means I’d always been curious to know what it would be like to meet a murderer. And now I knew.”

“And what did he say to that?”

“He asked me what I meant by that, and I said, ‘I think you know,’ and he said, ‘Oh…Maude King.’ And then he paused—such an innocent-looking, dimpled, moon-faced miscreant—and said, ‘Accidents will happen.’”

I knew about Maude King—she was an eccentric, wealthy widow from Chicago, the kind the papers like to call a “madcap heiress,” and Gaston Means had wormed his way into her confidence by foiling some thugs who accosted her on a street corner in the Loop. He became her financial adviser, and bilked her out of an estimated $150,000, before taking her on a hunting trip in North Carolina, where Mrs. King was “accidentally” shot to death.

It seemed Means had taken the target pistol the two of them had been using and left it in the crotch of a tree while he wandered off for a drink of spring water. Somehow the gun had discharged in Means’s absence, and Mrs. King managed to get shot behind the left ear. The North Carolina jury acquitted Means; the Chicago press had not.

“Means has a history, obviously,” I said, “of taking advantage of attractive, wealthy women.”

Her smile was as many-faceted as the gleaming jewel that rode her gently moving bosom. “Attractive wealthy
older
women, don’t you mean?”

“Not really. I remember seeing photos of Maude King—she didn’t look any older than you. Which is to say, not old at all.”

“That’s diplomatic, Nate. But I’m at least ten years your senior….”

“The point is,” I said, “Means has fixed his sights on women with money before. Are you sure he didn’t seek you out?”

“Absolutely not. I called him. He came here, to my home.”

“When was this?”

“The fourth of March.”

Hell, that was several days before I even got involved in the case.

She pointed off vaguely to the rest of the house. “There’s a drawing room on this floor, with a balcony overlooking it. I met Means there, while my friend Elizabeth Poe, a reporter from the
Post,
hid above with a revolver.”

It was obvious from the sparkle in her eyes that she loved the intrigue.

“I asked him point-blank if he knew anything about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Without hesitation, he said, ‘It so happens that I do. Why?’ I might have asked, is it true blue is your favorite color?”

“Evalyn, a good con man never misses a beat. You toss him a curve, he’ll bat the ball out of the park.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, I told him of my concern, my sympathy, for the Lindberghs, and said I wanted to aid in effecting the boy’s return. Then I asked him what he knew about the kidnapping, warning that if there was any funny business, I’d see him sent to prison.”

She tried to sound stern and tough, but it was about as convincing as Means’s story about the pistol in the crotch of the tree.

“He said he didn’t blame me for being skeptical about him. He said he’d committed just about every kind of sin under the sun. But what he said next convinced me.”

“What was that?”

“He said, ‘I haven’t come forward to the police or press with what I know about the Lindbergh case because of the tissue of lies that my life has been so far.’ That phrase struck me: ‘tissue of lies.’”

“Con men always have a way with words, Evalyn.”

“He claimed he’d been in a New York speakeasy about ten days before, where he’d run into an old cellmate of his from Atlanta. The old friend asked Means, or so Means said, if he was interested in playing ransom negotiator in a big kidnapping that was going to be pulled around March first.”

“Did Means say his friend specifically mentioned Lindbergh?”

“Means said he’d been told only that it was a ‘big-time snatch.’ But Means turned down the opportunity, saying that ‘napping’ was one crime he wouldn’t touch.”