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 cafes 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.”
