Stolen Away

“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.