She had fallen asleep in my arms, both of us half-sitting up, pillows behind us, blankets sheathing us. Light seeped through the cracks of the boarded-up windows. The long night was over.
As I was getting out of bed, I heard something fall heavily to the floor; I jumped, and Evalyn jumped awake.
“What…?” she began.
I stood, frozen, looking at a small table against the side wall, where four or five books were in the process of tumbling to the floor, from between two secure bronze horse-head bookends.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
Our eyes would’ve been right at home in a minstrel show.
I walked slowly over to the table. The books were on the floor, in an ungainly heap. The bookends stood alone, on the table but flush against the wall, as had been the books, before they fell. It was as if someone had shoved them on the floor; only the wall was where the books would have to have been shoved from.
I shrugged, said it was nothing, started getting my clothes on. Evalyn nodded, shrugged, padded down the hall to her own room to dress. We said nothing more about it, not over breakfast anyway; we said almost nothing at all, actually, except to comment on what a nice sunny day it was for a change.
Shortly after breakfast the phone jangled out in the hall and scared the hell out of all of us. The rings echoed through the big, mostly empty house, as Evalyn rushed to answer.
She held the receiver sideways so I could stand next to her and listen.
“Hogan speaking,” said the voice of Gaston Means. “Who is this?”
“This is Eleven,” Evalyn said.
“Eleven, we couldn’t get through with the book last night. We had a close call.”
“A close call?”
“Listen carefully: come to my home at Chevy Chase this afternoon. Be very, very careful of your movements; make certain you’re not followed. I’ll see you there at half past two.”
And we heard the click of him hanging up.
She looked at me, phone still in her hand. “I’m going, of course.”
“Not alone.” I touched her shoulder, firmly. “This could be a replay of the Maude King ‘accident.’”
“Come with me, then. He didn’t say I couldn’t bring my chauffeur.”
So early that afternoon I put on my chauffeur’s uniform and, with her navigating, found my way to Chevy Chase, in Maryland just across the state line from the District of Columbia. The neighborhood was residential and affluent, albeit not affluent in the Evalyn Walsh McLean sense. The house at 112 Leland was a big white two-story pillared number with a spacious, sloping lawn behind a wire-mesh fence-a comfy castle with the prisonlike touch of the fence and, here and there, floodlights mounted to posts. My guess was alarms and switches were hooked up, as well-Means had invested in a considerable security system.
The gate was open, however-we were expected, at least Evalyn was-and I stood behind her with my chauffeur’s cap in my hands as she rang the bell. A tall, slender youth of perhaps sixteen, neat as a pin in a diamond-patterned sweater and gray slacks, answered the door.
“We’re here to see Mr. Means,” Evalyn said, smiling.
The boy nodded; his eyes were large, brown, guileless.
“Please come in,” he said, and we did.
The house was as neat, as orderly, as the boy’s apparel. Well furnished, in the Early American mode. The people who lived here weren’t rich exactly, but they were clearly successful.
“I think my father is expecting you,” the boy said.
Means’s voice boomed down. “Hello there! Come on up!”
We went up the staircase, leaving the boy behind, and there, on the landing, stood Means-as disheveled as his house wasn’t. His brown suit rumpled, his tie loose, his eyes bloodshot, his breath boozy, his face sweat-slick, Means ushered us into a cluttered den past a table on which was a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of a long board with four dry-cell batteries, a big light bulb and a reflector.
The big moon-faced bastard fell heavily into the chair behind his messy desk. “God, Eleven! What a close call we had last night.”
“What do you mean, Means?”
“Call me ‘Hogan,’ Eleven. I must insist. Should we talk in front of your chauffeur?”
“I’m agent Sixteen,” I said, “remember?”
“If you’re a police spy,” Means said enigmatically, “the Lindbergh boy will bear the burden.”
“Tell us about your close call,” I said. I found Evalyn a chair, clearing off some letters and old newspapers. I stood, cap in hand. The cap was covering the nine millimeter in my waistband.
“I went to the place the baby is being kept,” Means said darkly, sitting forward, hands locked prayerlike.
“Where was it?” Evalyn asked.
“I can’t divulge that,” Means said, with a regretful wag of his massive bald noggin. “I gave my word to the criminals I wouldn’t share their location with anyone. But I will say it’s within a hundred miles of Washington.”
“Did you see him?” Evalyn asked, breathlessly. “Did you see Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr.?”
“Yes,” Means said, matter-of-factly, his dimples cute as a baby’s behind. “I held the boy in my arms. He had blue eyes, blond hair, was dressed in a knitted cap, buff coat, brown shoes and white stockings. The age and appearance tallied with everything I’ve seen and heard about the child.”
Evalyn looked at me yearningly; she longed to believe this.
“What about the close call?” I said.
Means narrowed his eyes, cocked his head, sat forward. “Last night, sometime after midnight, we started out from the gang’s headquarters in two cars. I was traveling in the lead car. The Fox, with the baby in tow, was in the second. I was to keep an eye out for police. If I saw the police were stopping cars and searching them, I was to use my invention…” He pointed to the Rube Goldberg contraption with the light bulb. “…and signal the car behind, where the Fox was with the baby. I was to flash the light three times.”
Evalyn glanced at me; she seemed excited. She was buying this.
“Along toward three in the morning,” Means continued, “we were nearly to Far View when I saw a car stopped by a policeman up ahead. I flashed my light three times, and the car behind me turned and went back.”
“Back?” I asked.
“To the hideout,” he said, melodramatically.
This guy ought to have been on the radio.
“Back at the hideout,” he went on, “the Fox and the rest of the boys were jittery as june bugs. The Fox said the deal was definitely off, as far as Far View being the drop point was concerned.”
Evalyn looked at me anxiously and saw my skepticism. She turned back to Means and said, “This sounds pretty queer to me….”
Means affected a hurt expression. Grandly, he opened a desk drawer and removed a brown-paper package fastened with red sealing wax.
“There’s your hundred thousand, Eleven,” he said. “Take your money back, if you want to pull out.”
Evalyn shook her head no. “I don’t want to pull out-as long as there’s the slightest chance we’ll get that baby back, I’m in.”
He plucked a letter opener from the mess on his desk and cut the cord on the package; the paper came loose and revealed green bills on top. Then he plucked from the package a tag, which he handed toward Evalyn. She took it. Read it. Handed it to me.
It said:
GASTON B. MEANS
Property of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean
“I put this on the package,” he said, taking back the tag, “for your protection. Should I meet my death in this endeavor, your money will be returned.”
I knew just eyeballing it that that package wasn’t big enough to hold one hundred grand in small currency; but I would have to tell her later. And was his desk drawer the “safe” he’d told me the money was locked away in?
