Washington, D.C., was as cold and gray as its granite memorials; what I’d heard about our nation’s capital and cherry blossoms in the springtime remained a rumor. I’d taken the train from Princeton, arrived at Union Station and let a taxi carry me out into the bleak wintry afternoon. No point in trying to maneuver a car around these streets myself; I’d had a look at a D.C. map back at Hopewell and knew it was hopeless: wheels within wheels with stray spokes flung here and there.
As the taxi drew away from the train station plaza, a modest little collection of fountains and monuments and statues overseen by the Capitol dome, I straightened my tie and pulled up my socks, thinking about the million-some bucks I was about to call on.
Million-dollar destination or not, it was just a fifty-cent ride, including tip, down Massachusetts Avenue to Dupont Circle. My cabbie, a redheaded kid who looked Irish but had a Southern accent, pointed the sights out to me lethargically as we crawled through traffic as thick as any in Chicago or New York. I was less interested in the Government Printing Office or the row of red-brick buildings “built for Stephen Douglas back in the 1850s” than the stream of pretty young female office workers getting off work, pouring out of the various government buildings like coeds heading for the big game. Here and there tattered unshaven guys selling apples or just looking for some buddy to spare them a dime leaned in the shadows of massive, unheeding buildings they probably helped pay for, back when they were making a living. Soon those buildings briefly gave way to colored tenements, until poverty again slipped into the shadow of limestone and white marble. After about the sixth statue of some distinguished dead guy-a Civil War hero or Daniel Webster or whoever-I informed the cabbie, “The commentary won’t buy you a bigger tip. Do I look like a big spender?”
Actually, I almost did. I was manicured, cleaned, pressed, pomaded, perfectly presentable from my topcoat to my toenails. I had clean underwear on and everything. Lindbergh had slipped me fifty extra bucks for expenses, and asked me to pack my bag so I could stay as long or short as this took.
The cabbie drew up in front of a building slightly smaller than Chicago’s City Hall. I knew there had to be some mistake.
“This isn’t it,” I said, half out of the cab, half in.
“Sure it is,” he drawled. “2020 Massachusetts.”
“But I’m supposed to be dropped off at a residence. This is a damn embassy or something.”
The building before me was a four-story brick building that looked regal in a vaguely Italian way, its walls curving, black latticework and white columns dressing the many windows; but despite the gingerbread, the joint seemed institutional, somehow, a cross between a villa and a public school-a big public school.
“Who are you callin’ on?”
“Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean.”
“That’s where Mrs. McLean lives, all right,” he said. “You figure her for a bungalow, bud?”
The black iron-spike fence was unlocked. Detective that I am, I found my way up a winding walk through an evergreen-landscaped yard to an elaborate inset pillared front porch, sort of a portico that got punched in. Massive dark-wood-and-cut-glass doors were framed by smooth, round, green-veined marble columns. Wearing clean underwear suddenly seemed less than impressive.
The butler who answered the doorbell certainly wasn’t impressed with me, clean underwear or not. He was tall, beefy, pale, cueball-bald and perhaps fifty, with a lumpy blank face and contempt-filled eyes.
I didn’t wait to be asked in. I was used to servants who didn’t like me, and brushed by him, saying, “Nathan Heller. Mrs. McLean is expecting me.”
That display of cockiness got knocked right out of me as I moved into a reception area you could’ve dropped my residential hotel on Dearborn in and still done plenty of receiving.
“Your coat, sir,” the butler said. “And your baggage?” Clipped British tones, but this bloke was no Brit.
I climbed out of the coat, handed it and the traveling bag to him, trying not to scrape my jaw on the floor as I took everything in. The reception hall rose four stories to a vast, stained-glass window that bathed the rich dark-wood room in golden dappled light. An impossibly wide staircase rose under the golden window to a landing where two marble classical statues did a frozen dance; on their either side, a stairway rose to promenade galleries on successive floors.
So deep into the afternoon, on an overcast day like this one, it struck me as weird that the stained-glass skylight could still turn this room into a golden shrine. Then it hit me: not the how, but the why-Evalyn Walsh McLean’s father, Thomas F. Walsh, had been a Colorado mining millionaire. A gold miner who struck it rich.
The butler returned without my coat and bag, but with the same air of superiority.
“Was this by any chance the Walsh family home?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
That explained the gold motif, all right.
“Who lives here now?”
“Mrs. McLean, sir, and her three children, when they’re not off at school, sir.”
“And Mr. McLean?”
He pursed his lips. “Mr. and Mrs. McLean do not live together, sir. Please come with me. Mrs. McLean is waiting.”
Our footsteps echoed and reechoed across the oak parquet floor. The door he opened for me, over to the left, was small; one would not expect it to lead anywhere grand.
One would be wrong.
We were now in what seemed to be a ballroom: an elaborate mural of angelic babes-both the bosomy and cherubic varieties-playing musical instruments on a curved plaster sky; the walls were surprisingly unostentatious plaster, but the wood trim was all gilt-edged. There was a cut-glass chandelier, and a stage behind which sheer-yellow-curtained windows bathed the room golden.
“What is this?” I asked him, working to keep up with him, as we cut diagonally across the smooth wood floor. We seemed to be heading toward a gold-veined marble fireplace.
“The Louis XV ballroom, sir.”
“I’ve never been in a house with a ballroom before.”
“There are several more upstairs, sir. Not to mention the roof garden.”
“Not to mention that.”
He opened a door just past the fireplace and indicated I should go on in.
The half-circle sun porch I stepped out onto seemed small in comparison to where I’d just been, but in reality was bigger than a suite at the Palmer House. Horizontal golden stained-glass panels above the windows painted the white room yellowish. This whole goddamn house had jaundice.
There wasn’t much furniture: just a few hard-back plush-seated chairs here and there. She wasn’t using one of them. She was standing, staring out at the street, across the snow-smattered and surprisingly meager brown lawn. She was small, and she was wearing a brown-and-yellow plaid woolen housecoat, the kind you could get for under a dollar at Sears Roebuck. Her back was to me, but her hand was turned toward me, away from her, diamonds and rubies on the fingers, a cigarette trailing smoke toward the doves in the stained glass above.
The butler cleared his throat and, with an expression he might have used while disposing of a dead rat by its tail with two fingers, said, “Mr. Heller to see you, madam.”
Her back still to us, she said, “Thank you, Garboni.”
I knew he was no limey.
“Leave the door open, Garboni. I’m expecting Mike any minute.” Her voice was husky; a sensual, throaty sound, two parts sex, one part chain-smoking.
He left us and I stayed planted well away from her, waiting for her to recognize my presence.
She turned slowly, like a ballerina on a music box. She was a morosely beautiful woman, with sad blue almond-shaped eyes, a slender, gently aquiline nose, lips neither thin nor full, painted blood-red. Her hair was short and dark brown, several curls studiously poised on her smooth, pale forehead. The dowdy bathrobe was floor-length but sashed around her small waist rather tightly; silver slippers peeked out from under. She was slim, almost tiny, but her breasts were large and high, a Gibson Girl figure, and she had that kind of face as well. She looked perhaps thirty, though forty was more like it.
She smiled but it only made her eyes sadder. “Mr. Heller,” she said, and moved toward me quickly, extending a red-nailed, bejeweled hand. “So kind of you to come. So kind of Colonel Lindbergh to send you.”
I took her hand, wondering if I was expected to kiss it, which I wouldn’t have minded doing-you got to start someplace. But before I could make up my mind, she tugged me over to one of two chairs on either side of a small glass-topped table where an overflowing ashtray sat next to a square, silver, sleek decorative lighter and a flat, square, silver decorative cigarette case on which “EWM” was engraved in a modernistic flourish.
She perched herself on the edge of the chair across from me, crossing her legs, robe falling away enough to reveal gams that were smooth and white and shapely. Being rich agreed with her.
“Excuse my appearance,” she said, shaking her head of curls, smiling ruefully. “Around the house, I’m a regular slob.”
“You look fine to me, Mrs. McLean.”
“If I’d known you would turn out to be such a handsome young man,” she said, her smile turning wicked, “I might have tried to dazzle you. I was expecting a policeman.”
“That’s what I am.”
“But not the rumpled, potbellied kind.” She flicked ashes into the tray. “You’re from Chicago?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I understand Gaston Bullock Means is well known there.”
“Yes he is. I’ve never met him myself, but I work pickpocket detail, and we frequently link up with the bunco boys. And they know Means very well indeed.”
“You may think me foolish,” she said, with a smirk directed at herself, “for calling upon that blackguard. But I understand Colonel Lindbergh himself has sought assistance in the underworld.”
Her arch phrasing should have seemed ridiculous to me; but for some reason I found it charming. Or maybe it was her legs I found charming. Or her breasts. Or her money.
“Colonel Lindbergh,” I said, “has tried going the underworld route-but recently he fired those bootlegger would-be go-betweens of his.”
“But he didn’t fire you.”
“No. But I’m not a gangster.”
“You’re a Chicago policeman.”
“Yeah, but that’s not exactly the same thing. Sometimes it’s a fine line, I admit….”
Her eyes narrowed; either my humor eluded her or she was too preoccupied to notice it. “I have been of the belief, from the very beginning, that this was an underworld job. Specifically, that your fellow Chicagoan Al Capone had a hand in it.”
“Well, there are people who might agree with you. Or who at least wouldn’t rule that out.”
“Which is why you’ve wandered so far off your beat?”
“Yes it is. But, frankly, this little shack of yours is the farthest I’ve wandered yet.”
I heard the sound of a dog’s claws scrambling on the wooden floor out in the ballroom. A big dog. I turned to see a Great Dane come hurtling into the room, saliva on his pink jowls. If I’d worn my gun, I’d have shot the son of a bitch.
But the dog put on the brakes and skidded to a stop at Mrs. McLean’s side; he curled up on the floor next to her chair and she leaned a hand down and began to scratch behind his ears, under a collar that glittered with rhinestones.
“This is Mike,” she said. “He’s a Great Dane.”
“I didn’t take him for a poodle.”
“My poodle died several years ago,” she said, absently. She smiled, wanly. “I do miss my other pets. Mike’s the only one I keep in town.”
“Really.”
“The monkey and llama are at Friendship. The parrot, too.”
“Friendship?”
“That’s the McLean family estate. Country estate. That’s where Ned is staying, these days.”
“Your husband.”
“Yes.” She twitched a smile, and it was nearly a grimace. “Friendship was a monastery, once, but I doubt Ned’s leading a monastic existence.” A sigh. “Things are a bit bitter at the moment, Mr. Heller. We’re separated, you see, Ned and I. We’re bickering over just who will divorce who. Or is it whom?”
“Whoever,” I said.
“I wouldn’t really care, except he’d like custody of our three children. And he’s a very sick man, Mr. Heller. Mentally ill. Alcoholic. Well, his little chippie can have him. But he can’t have the boys and Evalyn.”
“Evalyn? Your daughter’s name is Evalyn, too?”
Her smile was thin and proud. “Yes. That wasn’t the name we gave her-she was christened Emily, but several years ago, when her father and I began having our little problems, she turned against that name and declared she simply must have another. Mine.”
She petted the dog again. The big brown beast was plastered to the floor, his big jeweled collar sticking up stiffly, like a hoop his neck was caught in.
“Mrs. McLean, why did you get involved in the Lindbergh case? I know you have a reputation as something of a philanthropist, but…”
Her smile was one-sided and self-mocking; so was her cigarette-in-hand gesture. “But I’m also a silly, shallow, publicity-seeking society woman, correct, Mr. Heller? Both assessments are true. However my concern, my sympathy for the Lindberghs runs deeper than any social considerations, pure or self-interested. You see, Mr. Heller, their baby was, at the time of this crime, the most famous baby in the world. I was once the mother of the child who occupied that unhappy position. You’re just young enough not to remember.”
“Actually, I think I do. They called your son the ‘million-dollar baby,’ right?”
“‘One-hundred-million-dollar baby,’ to be exact. But I called him Vinson.”
“An unusual name.”
“It was my brother’s name. That, really, is where it all begins, Mr. Heller. My brother died young. He was barely seventeen.”
“I’m sorry.”
An eyebrow arched in a fatalistic shrug. “It was an automobile accident. No one’s fault, really. Vinson loved to race-it seems to me his favorite car, that year, was his Pope Toledo. He had one that he could change, in a jiffy, from a roadster with bucket seats to a sedate-looking family car with a large tonneau. One time he screeched in…” She gestured out toward the street and the driveway. “…slid the tonneau in place, and when the traffic cop who’d been chasing him spotted the buggy and pulled in, the officer scratched his head, saying he could swear this was the car he’d been chasing, but this one had a different kind of hind end.”
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.”