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.”
“Taking bribes from bootleggers?”
“That’s right. Anyway, I first met him several years ago, when some friends of ours in the administration were reluctant to contact Means directly about some documents he’d pilfered. They seemed in mortal fear of the barrel-bellied blackguard. So I called him up, arranged a meeting and picked the papers up from him, myself-as a favor.”
Evalyn Walsh McLean seemed an unlikely bagman for the Ohio Gang; but there it was.
“At our meeting,” she said, with a self-satisfied smirk, “Means made some threatening remarks about several friends of Ned’s and mine-Andrew Mellon, Harry Daughtery-and I put him in his place.”
Andrew Mellon was then Secretary of the Treasury; Daughtery had been Harding’s Attorney General.
“How did you do that, Evalyn?”
She shrugged, but her nonchalance wasn’t convincing. “I told Means I’d always been curious to know what it would be like to meet a murderer. And now I knew.”
“And what did he say to that?”
“He asked me what I meant by that, and I said, ‘I think you know,’ and he said, ‘Oh…Maude King.’ And then he paused-such an innocent-looking, dimpled, moon-faced miscreant-and said, ‘Accidents will happen.’”
I knew about Maude King-she was an eccentric, wealthy widow from Chicago, the kind the papers like to call a “madcap heiress,” and Gaston Means had wormed his way into her confidence by foiling some thugs who accosted her on a street corner in the Loop. He became her financial adviser, and bilked her out of an estimated $150,000, before taking her on a hunting trip in North Carolina, where Mrs. King was “accidentally” shot to death.
It seemed Means had taken the target pistol the two of them had been using and left it in the crotch of a tree while he wandered off for a drink of spring water. Somehow the gun had discharged in Means’s absence, and Mrs. King managed to get shot behind the left ear. The North Carolina jury acquitted Means; the Chicago press had not.
“Means has a history, obviously,” I said, “of taking advantage of attractive, wealthy women.”
Her smile was as many-faceted as the gleaming jewel that rode her gently moving bosom. “Attractive wealthy
“Not really. I remember seeing photos of Maude King-she didn’t look any older than you. Which is to say, not old at all.”
“That’s diplomatic, Nate. But I’m at least ten years your senior….”
“The point is,” I said, “Means has fixed his sights on women with money before. Are you sure he didn’t seek you out?”
“Absolutely not. I called him. He came here, to my home.”
“When was this?”
“The fourth of March.”
Hell, that was several days before I even got involved in the case.
She pointed off vaguely to the rest of the house. “There’s a drawing room on this floor, with a balcony overlooking it. I met Means there, while my friend Elizabeth Poe, a reporter from the
It was obvious from the sparkle in her eyes that she loved the intrigue.
“I asked him point-blank if he knew anything about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Without hesitation, he said, ‘It so happens that I do. Why?’ I might have asked, is it true blue is your favorite color?”
“Evalyn, a good con man never misses a beat. You toss him a curve, he’ll bat the ball out of the park.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, I told him of my concern, my sympathy, for the Lindberghs, and said I wanted to aid in effecting the boy’s return. Then I asked him what he knew about the kidnapping, warning that if there was any funny business, I’d see him sent to prison.”
She tried to sound stern and tough, but it was about as convincing as Means’s story about the pistol in the crotch of the tree.
“He said he didn’t blame me for being skeptical about him. He said he’d committed just about every kind of sin under the sun. But what he said next convinced me.”
“What was that?”
“He said, ‘I haven’t come forward to the police or press with what I know about the Lindbergh case because of the tissue of lies that my life has been so far.’ That phrase struck me: ‘tissue of lies.’”
“Con men always have a way with words, Evalyn.”
“He claimed he’d been in a New York speakeasy about ten days before, where he’d run into an old cellmate of his from Atlanta. The old friend asked Means, or so Means said, if he was interested in playing ransom negotiator in a big kidnapping that was going to be pulled around March first.”
“Did Means say his friend specifically mentioned Lindbergh?”
“Means said he’d been told only that it was a ‘big-time snatch.’ But Means turned down the opportunity, saying that ‘napping’ was one crime he wouldn’t touch.”
The fire crackled.
I sat sideways and looked right at her, getting her attention away from the flames. “So then when the Lindbergh kidnapping broke on the radio and in the papers, Means figured it must be the ‘big-time snatch’ his pal mentioned.”
She nodded; her eyes looked unblinkingly my way, the fire reflecting in them, the stone on her chest doing the same. “Means claimed he’d contacted several prominent men here in Washington, including Colonel Guggenheim, but hadn’t gotten anywhere. Means was viewed as the little boy crying wolf. I later ascertained from Colonel Guggenheim and a prominent local judge that this was quite true.”
