“Nathan Heller,” Gaston Means said, sitting up in bed, with his usual puckish smile, though his eyes had no twinkle, just a disturbed, disturbing glaze, and his dimples were lost in the hollows of his cheeks. He’d lost weight and his skin, which bore a yellowish cast from frequent gallstone attacks, had the loose look of oversize clothing. He wore a hospital nightgown, and was under the sheets and horsehair blankets of a bed in the prison ward in the Medical and Surgical Building of St. Elizabeth’s, a government mental hospital in Congress Heights, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. The window next to him had both bars and mesh, like the skylight near Hauptmann’s death-row cell.
Evalyn and I were standing next to his bed. Evalyn was wearing white, for a change, though the outfit was trimmed in black and her hat was white with black trim, too; she looked like a wealthy nurse.
“I never told you my name, Means,” I said.
“Ah, but you made an impression on me, Heller,” he said, and some twinkle almost cracked the glaze on the eyes. “Any man who puts a gun barrel in my mouth leaves his imprint on my psyche. Effective piece of psychology-I must compliment you.”
“Thanks.”
“I made a point to check up on you, yes indeedy. Like me, you’ve made your mark in the field of private investigation. You have certain acquaintances of influence in the underworld, as do I. You have, to put it mildly, quite a reputation, young man.”
“Coming from you,” I said, “I guess that’s a compliment.”
He looked at Evalyn warmly, placing a hand on his heart, as if about to be sworn on the witness stand, where he would of course lie his gallstones off.
“My dear Eleven,” he said, reverting to Evalyn’s long-ago code number, “you look charming. Are you lovely because you’re so rich, or are you rich because you’re so lovely? I’ll leave that question to the philosophers. At any rate, I want you to know that I harbor no ill feelings toward you.”
“You harbor no ill feelings toward me?” Evalyn said, eyes wide, her white-gloved hand touching her generous bosom.
“For testifying against me,” he said, seemingly astounded that she hadn’t known what he meant.
“You wouldn’t want to demonstrate your good will,” I said, “by telling us where Mrs. McLean’s one hundred thousand is, would you?”
He cocked his head and raised a lecturing finger. “That’s one hundred and four thousand,” he said. “And, no-that’s a point on which I’m rather fuzzy. I have a vague memory of stuffing the cash in a piece of pipe and throwing it into the Potomac. But from which pier exactly, I’m afraid it’s just not clear.”
“Right,” I said.
He began to cough; it did not seem feigned-it rattled the steel bed and his yellow face turned purple.
When the coughing subsided, and his color (such as it was) returned, Evalyn asked him, “How ill are you, Means?”
He straightened his bedclothing, summoned his dignity. “These gallstones are a damned nuisance, my dear. That’s not why I’ve come to St. Elizabeth’s, however. I’m here for serious psychiatric evaluation. I have had, on occasion, a tendency to fabricate, and to have difficulty differentiating illusion from reality.”
“No shit,” I said.
“Please, Heller,” Means said, flashing me a stern look. “There is a lady present.” He smiled at Evalyn like Friar Tuck. “All my troubles date to that fateful night of December eighth, 1911, when I fell from the upper berth of a Pullman car and struck my head.”
“Your first major insurance scam,” I said.
“Fourteen thousand dollars,” Means said, with a nostalgic sigh. “And fourteen thousand was money, then.”
A doctor interrupted us to read Means’s charts, and we stood to one side and waited; a not unattractive nurse brought him some pills and a cup of water and he smiled at her and called her “my dear” and harmlessly flirted.
When they’d gone, he said to us, “I’m suffering from high blood pressure of the brain, you see. It’s a direct result of that fall from the Pullman berth. It made me develop this fantastic imagination, which has gotten me into so much trouble. I’ve never profited a dime from any of my bootlegging or blackmail schemes, because I’ve always returned the money…except in your case, Eleven, because I simply can’t remember where it is.”
“That’s not why we’re here,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. Interested. “And why are you here, Heller?”
“I’m working for Governor Hoffman.”
He lit up like a Halloween pumpkin; the dimples in the hollows of the cheeks asserted themselves. “Splendid! I’ve sent numerous letters to Governor Hoffman. I’m delighted that he’s decided to help me in my mission.”
Evalyn blinked. “Your ‘mission’?”
Means nodded solemnly; he folded his hands prayerlike on what remained of his once formidable belly. “I have decided to dedicate all of my efforts to aid that poor, so unfairly maligned soul, Bruno Hauptmann.”
I sat on the edge of his bed. “No kidding. Your sense of justice is offended, is it?”
“It most certainly is. I’ve written not only to Governor Hoffman but Prosecutor Wilentz and Colonel Lindbergh, in England, and many other of the principals in the case. I’m doing my level best, in the midst of my illnesses, to help secure a stay of execution for Mr. Hauptmann.”
“You’re quite a guy, Means. Why are you doing this?”
“Because,” he said, with a simple shrug, “I masterminded the Lindbergh kidnapping.”
Neither Evalyn nor I reacted.
That disappointed him; he seemed almost hurt. “Did you understand me? I said, I am the man. Hauptmann does not deserve the blame, nor for that matter the credit, for this elaborate crime. A simple ignorant carpenter. Ludicrous. The crime of the century was masterminded by the criminal mind of the century: Gaston Bullock Means!”
“That’s not what you told us a few years ago,” I reminded him.
He waggled a finger in the air. “Ah, but I was lying then, at least in part. Why do the two of you take this admission of mine so lightly? This is the most important confession ever made in the history of American jurisprudence.”
“Means,” I said, “I told you I was working for Hoffman. He showed the several of your letters. I know about your claims to have ‘masterminded’ this thing. So does Evalyn-that is why we’re here.”
“Oh. Then I suppose you’re hoping to fill in some of the details.”
“You might say that. You claim you built the ladder yourself?”
“Absolutely, in my garage at home at Chevy Chase. Hauptmann would have done a more professional job of it; he’s a carpenter, after all. The ladder, by the way, was used only to look in the window and see if the child was in the room, not to bring him out-the child was handed out the front door to operatives of mine by the butler. That’s why the ladder was found discarded seventy-some feet away.”
“What about Max Greenberg and Max Hassel? I thought they were the ‘masterminds.’”
“They worked for me. I had my connections with all of those rumrunners and bootleggers. The gang that Curtis came into contact with, they worked for me, too. It was my show from the start.”
Evalyn moved nearer the bed. “In one letter to Governor Hoffman, you claimed you’d been hired by relatives of Mrs. Lindbergh, to take the child.”
“Ah, yes-because the boy was retarded. And I was aided by Greenberg and Hassel, and that pair on the inside, Violet Sharpe and Ollie Whately.”
“Are you saying that’s true?” Evalyn asked.
“Which part?” he asked innocently.
“Which part isn’t true?” I asked.
“The part about the retarded baby. It’s a rumor I heard once, and liked the sound of.”
I wondered if they had an extra bed open in this mental ward.
“Your friends Greenberg and Hassel,” I said, “somebody murdered them, you know.”
He nodded slowly, gravely. “Life can be so unkind.”
“Death, too,” I said. “Funny thing: they were murdered shortly after you gave me their names. After you fingered ’em as the real kidnappers.”
“Coincidence has a long arm.”
“Maybe you do, too, Means. Or people you’re allied with.”
“Means,” Evalyn said harshly, “is that baby still alive?”
His smile was angelic. “Let me first say that the body of the baby found in New Jersey was a ‘plant’-not the Lindbergh baby at all.”
“Why was that done?” I asked.
“To bring certain things to a halt,” he said. “For example, bootlegging activities in the Sourlands hills had been much disrupted. Too many troopers, too much activity, too much company. With the discovery of the child, things could go back to normal. Business as usual.”
“Is that baby still alive?” Evalyn repeated.
“My dear,” he said, “to my knowledge he is. I took that child to Mexico and left him there, unharmed. As God is my witness.”
I got off the edge of the bed, in case lightning struck the fucker.
“Where is the child now?” she asked.
“I have no idea,” he said, with an elaborate shrug. “I do know that the boy is in safe hands. As long as he lives, there are powerful people who can never be threatened with a murder charge.”
“No one believes you, Means,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“About being the mastermind of the Lindbergh kidnapping. You’re the wolf who cried little boy.”
He laughed silently. “Well put, Heller. Well put. And what do you think?”
“I think you may be telling the truth, for once in your life, or at least more truth than usual. Whether you really want to be believed or not is a question I couldn’t begin to answer. What truly goes on in the twisted corridors of your brain is anybody’s guess.”
He was nodding, smiling his puckish smile.
“If I were Al Capone,” I said, and his smile disappeared momentarily, as if the very name gave him pause, “I might choose you as the perfect middleman…a man with connections among bootlegging circles, political circles, high society-you’re ideal, except of course for being completely untrustworthy.”
“Ah,” Means said, tickling the air with a forefinger, “but if I were afraid of my employer…”
“If it were Capone, or an East-Coast equivalent like Luciano or Schultz, you’d play straighter than usual. To guard your fat ass.”
“Heller, that’s unkind. Language of that sort in front of Mrs. McLean is really uncalled for.”
“You go to hell, sir,” she said to him.
He was crestfallen. “I may have wronged you, my dear, but surely such hostility is not called for, between old friends.”
“For one hundred grand,” I said, “she’s earned the right.”
“One hundred and four,” he reminded me.
I shook my head, smiled. “You really have no shame, do you, Means?”
“These things are beyond my control,” he said somberly. “My imagination is a by-product of mental disease. That, my friends, is why I lobbied to be brought to St. E’s.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do,” I said, “with avoiding hard time at Leavenworth?”
“It’s more pleasant here, I admit,” he said brightly. Then he made his face serious: “You see, it’s my hope to have a brain operation, so that afterward, when I’ve been made a fit member of society, I can be paroled.”
Gaston Means was pulling his final, biggest con: fooling himself that he would ever get out from behind bars-although the glaze on his eyes suggested his mark might not be buying the scam, either.
“Tell me one thing, Means,” I said. “Level with me on just one thing: it’s not even important, in the great scheme of events. It’s just something I’d like to know.”
“Heller-we’ve been friends for so many years. Would I deny you such a small favor?”
“Back in ’32 when Evalyn and I and her maid Inga were camped out at her country place, Far View, did you come back at night, and sneak around, pulling the sheets off beds and walking around in the closed-off upstairs, just generally doing your best to spook us?”
“Ah-Far View,” Means said wistfully. “They say it’s haunted, you know. Some things go bump in the night, did they?”
“I think you know they did.”
He loved this. “So many years later, that brush with the supernatural has stuck with you, has it, Heller? A hard-nosed, clear-eyed realist of a lad like yourself?”
“You’re not going to level with me, are you, Means?”
“Heller, you’re the kind of man who would make love to a woman with the lights on.” He turned apologetically to Evalyn. “Please pardon the near crudity, Eleven.” He looked at me again, with an expression both scolding and amused. “Don’t you know there are some things in life that are better left a mystery?”
“So long, Means,” I sighed.
Evalyn said nothing to him.
“Thank you for stopping by, my friends,” he said cheerily. “And Eleven-if it comes to me which pier I tossed your money off of, I will contact you at once.”
We left him sitting up in bed with his pixie puss frozen in a silly smile, looking vaguely mournful, like Tweedledum had Tweedledee died.
Friendship, the McLean estate behind a high wall on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., was smaller than the White House. A bit. Her place at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue, which at the time was the largest private residence I’d ever been in, could’ve been a porch, here.
“It used to be a monastery,” she said, as I navigated the driveway through lavishly landscaped grounds. “Can’t you just imagine those brown-robed monks, tending all the gardens and bushes? Like dozens of mute obedient gardeners.”
“Help like that is hard to find,” I said.
It was dusk and overcast and cold, and the huge house-dating to the early nineteenth century, but restored and remodeled into a modern-looking, sprawling, only vaguely colonial structure-loomed before me indistinctly, miragelike. I swung the Packard around by the big French fountain in front and, with her permission, parked it there.
I’d gotten used to being around Evalyn, who for all her melodrama and archness was a pretty down-to-earth gal; we’d even stopped for supper at a diner along the way where she ate with literal and figurative relish a greasy hamburger and greasier french-fried potatoes. But I hadn’t forgotten I was keeping company with a dame who ate with heads of state and entertained Washington society at her estate-an estate, I had discovered, complete with private golf course, greenhouse and duck pond.
Tonight was Thursday, my second night at Friendship. The Norfolk trip had taken all day Wednesday, setting out from New York in the morning and meeting with Curtis in the afternoon and driving back to Washington, D.C., in the evening, so we could have our meeting with Means at St. Elizabeth’s today. I had my own room at Friendship, and the same was true for the night we spent in New York, at the St. Moritz. Evalyn and I were getting along famously, but not intimately.
We sprawled in overstuffed chairs that were angled toward a fireplace over which a framed oil painting of her husband’s father hung and in which a fire lazily crackled, casting an orangish glow over this large sitting room. The room had pale plaster walls, part of the recent remodeling, and new, expensive furnishings, running to dark wood and floral upholstery, and was littered with end tables with lavish lamps and framed family photos; a much more modern feel to it than any room at 2020, despite a vast, decidedly old-fashioned Oriental carpet.
Everything we’d learned, at least anything that I thought to be of importance, we’d conveyed to Governor Hoffman by phone. Today we’d gotten news from the governor: Robert Hicks, his criminologist (actually, Evalyn’s, as she was paying the bill), had confirmed-through chemical analysis and paint scrapings-my theory about the shelf in the Hauptmanns’ kitchen closet.
“You’ve done well, Nathan,” she said, sipping a glass of wine. She was wearing black lounging pajamas and high-heel black slippers.
I was working on a Bacardi cocktail; my second. “We’ve made some progress, but nothing yet that will carry enough weight to buy Hauptmann another reprieve, let alone a new trial.”
She smiled and shook her head in supportive disagreement. “You’ve connected Fisch to those Harlem spiritualists, and Ollie Whately and Violet Sharpe, too. Not to mention Jafsie.”
“It’s thin,” I said, shaking my head back at her. “Gerta Henkel will be dismissed as Hauptmann’s lying kraut girlfriend. Who knows what the Marinellis will say, if they haven’t skipped town already. Whately and Sharpe are dead, and Jafsie’s dead from the neck up. Talking to Curtis leads me to believe most if not all of his story is true-but there’s nothing solid to back it up; and some of what Means told us today tallies with Curtis and other facts at our disposal. But again-what good does that do us? Means is a pathological liar in the loony bin. What we’ve most clearly found is police tampering with, and creating, evidence-and that’s not going to make us popular in New Jersey.”
“What’s it going to take?”
I laughed and it echoed off the plaster walls. “Maybe what I told the Governor: sitting Lindy’s kid down on Hoffman’s Statehouse desk.”
“You really think that child is alive?”
“I think it’s a possibility.”
“Then why aren’t we searching for it?”
“How exactly would we do that, Evalyn?”
She shook her head, smirked humorlessly. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we should ask one of those damn psychics.”
I laughed again. “Maybe we should’ve stopped in on ol’ Edgar Cayce, at Virginia Beach, while we were in his neck of the woods, yesterday.”
“Edgar Cayce?”
“Yeah. He’s this hick soothsayer who did a ‘reading’ on the kidnapping, way back in the first week or so of the case.”
She was sitting up. “Nate, Edgar Cayce is a very famous psychic. I’ve read a good deal about him. He’s no charlatan like the Marinellis.”
I gestured with an open hand. “Evalyn, you got to understand that some of these people are well intentioned. I don’t think Sister Sarah Sivella Marinelli Indian Princess Shit Feather knows she’s a fake. But her husband is, and he feeds her stuff, hypnotizes her maybe, and she winds up thinking she’s got a pipeline to the past, future and God almighty.”
She seemed to be only half-listening to my diatribe. “You met Cayce?” she asked.
“Yeah, I was there.”
“During the reading?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“What happened?”
I shrugged. “He gave his version of where the kid was taken, including a bunch of street names. It was supposed to be in some section of New Haven, Connecticut, only the feds checked up on it and none of those street names, or even that part of town, was there.”
Her eyes had narrowed. “Do you have your field notes on the Cayce readings?”
“Sure. They’re up in my room, in my bag.”
“Can I see them?”
“Sure. I’ll bring ’em down tomorrow morning; we’ll have a look at ’em over breakfast.”
“No, Nate-I mean, now.”
“Evalyn, I’m tired, and I’m working on getting drunk. Can’t this wait?”
“The clock is ticking for Hauptmann.”
“Oh, fuck, spare me the violins. I’ve about had my fill of this screwball tragedy for one day and night, and maybe for one lifetime. It can fucking wait.”
She said nothing for a while. That was fine with me.
Then she said, “You know, people close to me over the years say that I am fey.”
“Fey? What does that mean, you like to sleep with girls, now?”
“No, you silly son of a bitch. It means…visionary. In the psychic sense.”
“Oh. So you believe in this spook stuff, too.”
“You asked Means about those supernatural doings at Far View, didn’t you? That happened a long time ago, to still be lingering in your mind.”
“There was nothing supernatural about any of that. Means was sneaking around in his socks doing a number on us. He all but admitted as much this afternoon.”
“That’s not the way I took it. Nate, there have been psychic elements in this case from the beginning.”
“A big case like Lindbergh attracts screwballs like shit attracts flies.”
“How elegantly said.” She sat forward, her hands folded in her lap, a demure posture for a woman in black pj’s. “In my life I’ve had premonitions, Nate, that have come to pass. It simply happens to me, from time to time that, without being able to say how exactly, I know that death impends for someone in my circle…”
“That’s bunk, Evalyn.”
“I had that feeling the weekend my son died. I heard the inner voice but I didn’t listen, and went off on a trip, and my precious boy died while I was away…. Ned and I at Churchill Downs, to watch the running of the Kentucky Derby. For which I never will forgive myself.”
She covered her face with a hand.
I went over to her, knelt by her, gave her my handkerchief, patted her knee. “I’m sorry, Evalyn. It hurts. I know it hurts.”
“If that child is still alive,” she said, and for a moment I thought she meant her own son but she meant instead the Lindbergh boy, “we should try to find him.”
“You want those notes? I’ll get those notes. Will that make you feel better, baby?”
She nodded.
I went up and got the notes.
When I came down she was standing in the black pool that was the discarded lounging pajamas; she wore nothing but the high-heel black slippers. The orange glow of the fire made her body look like something in a painting. A very sensual painting by an artist who wasn’t fey, if you get my drift.
She must’ve been in her mid-forties by now, but she had the body of a woman ten years younger, slender, smooth, the large breasts drooping a bit but so lovely, and waiting to be lifted.
“Come here, big boy,” she said. She held her arms out gently. “Come to mama.”
I fucked her on the Oriental carpet with my trousers down around my ankles; her stark naked, me half-dressed, there was something very nasty about it, and at the same time sweet. She made a lot of noise. I made some myself.
Then I was a puddle of flesh on her pajamas, half-unconscious, as tired as if I’d run a mile, while she was sitting, nude as a grape, in her overstuffed chair, lighting up a cigarette as she read the Cayce field notes in the firelight.
After a while, I started to put my clothes back on. She looked up from her reading and said, very businesslike, “Don’t get dressed. What’s the point? Why don’t you take the rest of your things off.”
“You mean, just sit here naked on the floor…”
“The servants have retired to their quarters. We won’t be disturbed. Now get your clothes off.” She returned to her reading.
I must’ve slept a little.
Then, having rolled over on my back, I looked up and she was standing over me. The exaggeration of the angle made her figure look more naked than naked, like looking at a living statue representing everything that made a man want a woman; I wanted to worship her and dominate her and be dominated and worshiped all at once. She smiled down at me over enormous breasts, her shape sharply outlined, the fireplace at her back. My dick stood to attention and she sat on me, easing herself down on me, with a subtle, shimmering motion.
This time we made love; fucking was part of it, but this time was far less urgent, far more sweet, and not at all nasty, churning to a slow, gradual, mutual release that lasted forever but not near long enough.
“Should I have used something?” I panted, after a while, as we lay entangled in each other’s nakedness.
“I’m not menopausal just yet, Nathan Heller.”
“Then maybe I should’ve used something.”
“Nate, if you made a baby tonight, he’s a rich little bastard. So don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t,” I said, and smiled. “Is that bodyguard, chauffeur, security chief-type job still open?”
Her smile crinkled her chin. “It’s not fair to ask me right now.”
“If it’s still open, I accept.”
“Can I get back to you on that?”
“Sure.”
I put my pants on and she put her pajamas on and I had another cocktail and she had another glass of wine and sat in my lap in one of the big overstuffed chairs while we drank.
“Those notes,” she said.
“Hmmm?” I said.
“Those field notes about Edgar Cayce. I think we should go to New Haven. I think we should look for ourselves. Follow his clues.”
“They’re not clues, they’re ramblings, delusional goddamn bullshit.”
“Cayce is not a charlatan. He’s the genuine article.”
“There’s no such thing, baby, and besides, the feds checked it out, and found nothing.”
“How much confidence do you have in the ‘feds’?”
“Well…”
She had a point. Irey had sent a man to infiltrate the Marinelli church, way back when, and that undercover ace had either not come up with the Fisch/Whately/Sharpe/Jafsie connection, or had suppressed it.
“Let’s go take a look,” she said.
I shook my head, no. “I have to go see Ellis Parker tomorrow. That’s a genuine lead. Hoffman says Parker has a real suspect.”
“It would only take a day.”
“Hauptmann doesn’t have very many of those. Besides, I looked at a New Haven map myself, back then. Those streets aren’t there. There’s no Adams Street, no Scharten Street. The section called, what?”
“Cordova.”
“There’s no Cordova section in New Haven.”
She shrugged, tossed her head. “Maybe some of these street names are inexact. Maybe they’re phonetic. Maybe they’re phonetic and a bit off, and some interpretation is required.”
“What did you say?”
She shrugged. “Maybe some interpretation is required.”
What had Marinelli said to me the other day? When I was asking his wife why she’d seen a dead baby on a hillside, in one vision, and then a child on a farm, in another? We can’t always know the meaning of what a medium says in a trance-interpretation is required.
“I tell you what, Evalyn,” I said, stroking her smooth back. “If you want to check out this ‘lead’-this stale, improbable lead-you can. You’ve got more than one car?”
“Certainly,” she said, as if everyone did.
“Got someone you can take with you? Some big lug who can share the driving and look out for you? That butler, Garboni, can he handle himself?”
“Why, yes.”
I touched her arm. “Then check it out yourself. Take my field notes. It shouldn’t take more than a day, as you’ve said. Give it a try. And we’ll meet back here either Friday night or Saturday, whenever we’re both done.”
She was smiling. I don’t remember seeing her happier.
“Thank you, Nathan. What can I ever do to repay you?”
I sipped my Bacardi. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”