“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
I gestured with an open hand. “Evalyn, you got to understand that some of these people are well intentioned. I
