and religious pictures, including a cow-eyed Christ and an etching of the Good Samaritan. Against one wall was an old wooden filing cabinet, near a wooden bric-a-brac rack whose shelves brimmed with seashells, colored rocks, miniature elephants, and various worthless trinkets. A frayed throw rug covered most of the wooden floor.
“This is Edgar Cayce,” she said, gesturing formally, “my husband.”
He was rising from an old, beat-up typewriter at a big, messy rolltop desk. He was as tall and slender as Lindbergh, but not at all stoop-shouldered; he had the perfect build for and general look of a stage magician, but not the demeanor. His hair was thinning and brown, and his round, small-chinned, genial face was at odds with his long, slender frame; he wore rimless glasses, and appeared to be, like his wife, in his mid-to late-fifties. He moved quickly toward us, extending his hand first to Breckinridge, then to me.
“Colonel Breckinridge,” he said; his voice was warm, soothing. That much fit the charlatan mold. “And you are?”
“Nate Heller,” I said. “I’m with the Chicago police.”
He smiled; he had the aura of a friendly uncle. His lips were full, his eyes as gray-blue as the water out the window behind him.
“You take in a lot of territory in your job, Mr. Heller,” he said.
“I don’t usually cut this wide a swath. But the Lindbergh kidnapping isn’t your usual case.”
He grew sober. “No. It is not. Would you gentlemen sit down, please?”
He plucked several wooden chairs from against a wall and we sat in the middle of the room, his wife joining us, like four card players who forgot their table.
“I pray that I can help you, gentlemen,” he said, hands on his knees, his kindly face solemn. “Like all Americans, I have great admiration and affection for Colonel Lindbergh. Of course, I can’t promise anything. My gift is not something I can control.”
“Your gift?” I asked.
Cayce shrugged. “I don’t claim to understand it at all. I only know I do have some kind of strange gift, or power. I put myself to sleep, and words come out of me that I don’t hear at the time and don’t even understand later, when I read them transcribed. I do know, that in the thirty-odd years I’ve been at this, thousands of folks have been healed and helped and not one has been harmed.”
Spoken like a true con man.
“Now you realize, I rarely deal with criminal matters,” he said. “My readings are primarily related to health problems.”
“Psychics have been known,” Breckinridge said, in a friendly tone, “to help the police, on occasion. There have been recorded instances of success….”
He raised his hand. “I’ve dealt in such matters, but I don’t like to. Once, many years ago, I gave a reading about a murder in Canada.” His eyes looked upward, as if he kept his memory on the ceiling. “There were two old maids, both of them wealthy, both of them misers…. One of them said the other was shot and killed by a prowler. The police interrogated every suspect and vagrant around the countryside, and got nowhere. I gave a reading in which I stated that there’d been no prowler-one sister killed the other in a rivalry over a suitor. After which, I said, the surviving old maid had thrown the murder gun out of the window, where a heavy rain carried it some distance away. The police found the gun exactly where I said it would be, down a slope in the muddy ground-and then they came around to arrest me. Said only an accomplice could know the details I did.”
I smiled. “But you had an alibi.”
“An excellent one,” he said, returning my smile. “First of all, I was many hundreds of miles away at the time. Second of all, I had never met any of the principals.”
“That would do it,” I admitted.
“But that,” Cayce said reflectively, “was not what put me off detective work. Shortly thereafter, a private investigator contacted me about some stolen bonds he was trying to track. I agreed, reluctantly, to help him. I described the person who’d stolen the bonds, a woman on the ‘inside,’ who had a red birthmark on her thigh, and a bad scar on her toes from a childhood accident.” He shook his head. “It seems my description fit the wife of the owner of the bonds-who thought the little woman was in Chicago visiting her sister. Instead, she was in a Pennsylvania hotel with her boyfriend. It was a hotel I identified in my reading, and they were both brought to justice.”
“Why,” Breckinridge asked, “did that ‘put you off’ of the detective game?”
“Because,” Cayce said, “I don’t like to feel that my power is being used to hound and punish anyone. Even if they are crooks, and deserve to be caught.”
“I didn’t like it either,” his wife said. “Edgar was given his gift for healing the sick. Whenever he has used it for any other purpose, he’s been struck with severe headaches and other physical ailments. It makes him ill and unhappy-and it frightens me.”
Cayce was nodding. He obviously viewed his wife as his partner in the practice of his gift-or grift, whichever.
“Why are you making an exception, here?” I asked him. Smelling an approaching con.
Cayce lowered his head. His hands were still on his knees, but slack, now. “Some years ago, Gertrude and I lost a son. He was a sick little boy, colicky, crying endlessly. My wife was very worried, but I was busy with readings for patients. And I’ve always been…reluctant to use the gift where my own family is concerned….”
He touched his fingers to his eyes, head still lowered.
Then he continued: “I was stunned, when the doctor told me Milton was dying. Colitis. They had done all they could, but he was a small boy, and frail. Finally, I gave him a reading, wondering why, dear God, I hadn’t done it before.”
And now tears were rolling down Cayce’s cheeks.
I felt very uncomfortable. I was pulled between thinking I was a heel for doubting this guy, and wondering if I was seeing the world’s greatest scam artist at work.
His wife rose and stood next to him and put her arm around his shoulder; her eyes were moist, but the tears weren’t flowing like Cayce’s were.
“I awoke,” he said, “and knew the answer without asking. My father, who helped me with my readings, looked pale, looked terrible. My wife was weeping. And in the hour before dawn, my son, died…just as my reading had said he would.”
His wife squeezed his shoulder. They smiled at each other, as she dabbed his tears away with a hanky.
Christ, this was embarrassing! I hated being close to this, whether it was legitimate or ill.
I didn’t know whether Breckinridge bought it or not. But he said to Cayce, “And this is why you are willing to get involved in the Lindbergh matter.”
Cayce nodded vigorously. “I will do anything I can to reunite that family with its missing boy.”
Mrs. Cayce left the room, while Cayce began to take off his coat and necktie. He loosened his collar and cuffs and sat on the studio couch and began to untie his shoes. Then a good-looking blonde in her late twenties, in a trim pink-and-white dress, her sheer hosiery flashing, entered the room with Mrs. Cayce trailing behind.
Now we were getting somewhere.
“This is Gladys Davis,” Mrs. Cayce said.
The blonde smiled at me and I smiled right back. She was carrying a steno pad, I noticed. So the clairvoyant had a dishy dame for a secretary. Now I was starting to feel at home.
“Miss Davis has been our secretary since 1923,” Mrs. Cayce explained. “Her older sister was in our Christian study group.”
Praise Jesus.
“What do we need to do?” Breckinridge asked Mrs. Cayce.
“Nothing, dear,” she said, touching the lawyer’s hand. “You and Mr. Heller just sit quietly and watch. It would help if you would use our initial moments of meditation to turn your own thoughts inward.”
That was me. I was one reflective son of a bitch.
Miss Davis settled her sweet frame into the schoolboy desk chair near the couch, where Cayce had stretched out, his hands on his forehead, palms up; what was he going to do, wiggle his fingers and pretend he was a bunny rabbit?
Gertrude Cayce took the chair near her husband’s head. He looked at her lovingly, and she looked at him the same way, and stroked his cheek lightly. It was a moment between them that seemed very real to me-suddenly the
