Stolen Away

by Collins, Max Allan

  She perched herself on the edge of the chair across from me, crossing her legs, robe falling away enough to reveal gams that were smooth and white and shapely. Being rich agreed with her.

  “Excuse my appearance,” she said, shaking her head of curls, smiling ruefully. “Around the house, I’m a regular slob.”

  “You look fine to me, Mrs. McLean.”

  “If I’d known you would turn out to be such a handsome young man,” she said, her smile turning wicked, “I might have tried to dazzle you. I was expecting a policeman.”

  “That’s what I am.”

  “But not the rumpled, potbellied kind.” She flicked ashes into the tray. “You’re from Chicago?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I understand Gaston Bullock Means is well known there.”

  “Yes he is. I’ve never met him myself, but I work pickpocket detail, and we frequently link up with the bunco boys. And they know Means very well indeed.”

  “You may think me foolish,” she said, with a smirk directed at herself, “for calling upon that blackguard. But I understand Colonel Lindbergh himself has sought assistance in the underworld.”

  Her arch phrasing should have seemed ridiculous to me; but for some reason I found it charming. Or maybe it was her legs I found charming. Or her breasts. Or her money.

  “Colonel Lindbergh,” I said, “has tried going the underworld route—but recently he fired those bootlegger would-be go-betweens of his.”

  “But he didn’t fire you.”

  “No. But I’m not a gangster.”

  “You’re a Chicago policeman.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not exactly the same thing. Sometimes it’s a fine line, I admit….”

  Her eyes narrowed; either my humor eluded her or she was too preoccupied to notice it. “I have been of the belief, from the very beginning, that this was an underworld job. Specifically, that your fellow Chicagoan Al Capone had a hand in it.”

  “Well, there are people who might agree with you. Or who at least wouldn’t rule that out.”

  “Which is why you’ve wandered so far off your beat?”

  “Yes it is. But, frankly, this little shack of yours is the farthest I’ve wandered yet.”

  I heard the sound of a dog’s claws scrambling on the wooden floor out in the ballroom. A big dog. I turned to see a Great Dane come hurtling into the room, saliva on his pink jowls. If I’d worn my gun, I’d have shot the son of a bitch.

  But the dog put on the brakes and skidded to a stop at Mrs. McLean’s side; he curled up on the floor next to her chair and she leaned a hand down and began to scratch behind his ears, under a collar that glittered with rhinestones.

  “This is Mike,” she said. “He’s a Great Dane.”

  “I didn’t take him for a poodle.”

  “My poodle died several years ago,” she said, absently. She smiled, wanly. “I do miss my other pets. Mike’s the only one I keep in town.”

  “Really.”

  “The monkey and llama are at Friendship. The parrot, too.”

  “Friendship?”

  “That’s the McLean family estate. Country estate. That’s where Ned is staying, these days.”

  “Your husband.”

  “Yes.” She twitched a smile, and it was nearly a grimace. “Friendship was a monastery, once, but I doubt Ned’s leading a monastic existence.” A sigh. “Things are a bit bitter at the moment, Mr. Heller. We’re separated, you see, Ned and I. We’re bickering over just who will divorce who. Or is it whom?”

  “Whoever,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t really care, except he’d like custody of our three children. And he’s a very sick man, Mr. Heller. Mentally ill. Alcoholic. Well, his little chippie can have him. But he can’t have the boys and Evalyn.”

  “Evalyn? Your daughter’s name is Evalyn, too?”

  Her smile was thin and proud. “Yes. That wasn’t the name we gave her—she was christened Emily, but several years ago, when her father and I began having our little problems, she turned against that name and declared she simply must have another. Mine.”

  She petted the dog again. The big brown beast was plastered to the floor, his big jeweled collar sticking up stiffly, like a hoop his neck was caught in.

  “Mrs. McLean, why did you get involved in the Lindbergh case? I know you have a reputation as something of a philanthropist, but…”

  Her smile was one-sided and self-mocking; so was her cigarette-in-hand gesture. “But I’m also a silly, shallow, publicity-seeking society woman, correct, Mr. Heller? Both assessments are true. However my concern, my sympathy for the Lindberghs runs deeper than any social considerations, pure or self-interested. You see, Mr. Heller, their baby was, at the time of this crime, the most famous baby in the world. I was once the mother of the child who occupied that unhappy position. You’re just young enough not to remember.”

  “Actually, I think I do. They called your son the ‘million-dollar baby,’ right?”

  “‘One-hundred-million-dollar baby,’ to be exact. But I called him Vinson.”

  “An unusual name.”

  “It was my brother’s name. That, really, is where it all begins, Mr. Heller. My brother died young. He was barely seventeen.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  An eyebrow arched in a fatalistic shrug. “It was an automobile accident. No one’s fault, really. Vinson loved to race—it seems to me his favorite car, that year, was his Pope Toledo. He had one that he could change, in a jiffy, from a roadster with bucket seats to a sedate-looking family car with a large tonneau. One time he screeched in…” She gestured out toward the street and the driveway. “…slid the tonneau in place, and when the traffic cop who’d been chasing him spotted the buggy and pulled in, the officer scratched his head, saying he could swear this was the car he’d been chasing, but this one had a different kind of hind end.”

  I smiled politely.

  She laughed a little, sighed. “Vinson liked my red Mercedes almost as much. Used to wear racing goggles when he drove it, and he could make that car deliver all the speed it had in it. I was with him when…when the tire blew. It was like a pistol shot. We were going down the grade toward Honeyman’s Hill, toward the creek, and went right through the side of the bridge. I nearly drowned. I’m still something of a cripple…one leg shorter than the other.” She shook her head. “He did love to race.”

  I didn’t know what to say; so I didn’t say anything.

  She looked at me with eyes that were deeply blue, in several senses. “So—I named my first son after Vinson. It seemed a good way to keep my brother alive, after a fashion. My Vinson was born in this house. Immediately the newspapers began calling him the ‘hundred-million-dollar baby.’ Even the Post—our own paper.”

  This was all vaguely familiar to me. “Didn’t he have a solid gold crib?”

  “It wasn’t solid gold at all,” she said, crankily. “It was a present to Vinson from our good friend, King Leopold. Of Belgium?”

  “Oh. That King Leopold.”

  “A handsome and generous gift, but it was just gold plating…yet the reporters made it out to be the crib of Baby Midas. That was when the notes began.”

  “Notes?”

  She waved her cigarette-in-hand in the air, impatiently, smoke curling. “Letters, telegrams, even anonymous phone calls despite our unlisted number, from criminals willing to accept the ‘golden crib’ as payment for not kidnapping my baby.”

  “Oh.”

  She shook her head. “Little Vinson couldn’t lead a normal life; he was virtually imprisoned. We had an electric fence, and armed guards patrolling the grounds. Even so, with all of that, an intruder sneaked past the guards and placed a ladder at the nursery window—just as at the Lindberghs’ estate—and was working on the heavy metal screen with wire-cutters when Vinson’s nurse spotted him and screamed.”

  “Did your men get the guy?”

  “No. They fired shots in the air, and he scurried off into the night. Left
a ladder, some footprints, untraceable. This kind of thing went on for years. Kidnap threats on their part, increased security on ours. Finally it ended.”

  “How?”

  She looked toward the street. “Ned and I were away. At the Kentucky Derby, at Churchill Downs. You know, I had a premonition…or at least a sense of foreboding. It’s a peculiar sensitivity; I can’t define it, really. But from time to time, I feel I know that death impends. I thought it was my own death—and at the hotel I wrote Vinson a long letter, telling him how much I adored him.”

  “What happened?”

  “One of the servants, a valet, was looking after Vinson that morning. Sunday morning. Vinson crossed the street, to talk to a friend; they began playing tag, the two boys, and Vinson was dodging his friend, and he stepped in the path of a tin lizzie. The funny thing was, the lizzie was going at a slow pace, I’m told. Did little more than push Vinson so that he fell down. The driver braked, didn’t run over him. Vinson seemed not badly hurt, at all.”

  “You don’t have to go on, Mrs. McLean.”

  She was still looking at the street; a single tear ran down her powdered cheek, glimmering like a jewel. “They picked him up and brushed the dust from his clothes. The doctors said there was nothing to be done—as long as there’d been no internal injury, he should prove none the worse for wear. But a few hours later my boy became paralyzed. And at six o’clock Sunday night, with me still away, he died. He was eight years old. He never saw the letter I wrote.”

  I didn’t offer my sympathy; it was too small a bandage for so deep and old a wound.

  She turned her head away from the street and looked at me and smiled tightly, politely. She didn’t wipe the tear away—she was proud of it, like all her jewels. “That, Mr. Heller, is why I am interested in helping the Lindberghs. As much pleasure as I’ve had giving various functions, or buying baubles, or contributing to charity, I tell you it’s meaningless, it’s empty, compared to the inner satisfaction I will feel if I can restore that baby to its mother’s arms.”

  She sounded damn near as silly as Professor Condon; but it hit me a different way. Maybe she was a spoiled, pampered society woman and about as deep as a teacup; but she was acting out of her own pain, and that touched even a jaded cynic like yours truly. Even if this image she had of herself was silly-ass ridiculous—appearing out of the mist with the baby in her arms, presenting it to its mother, like something out of the last reel of an old D. W. Griffith silent—it was obvious she had a good heart.

  She lit up another cigarette with the decorative silver lighter. “Do you believe in curses, Mr. Heller?”

  “I believe in tangible things, Mrs. McLean. If you mean, do I think your son died because you own the Hope diamond, no. At least not in the way you mean.”

  “Well, in what way, then?”

  “Only somebody as rich as you could afford that diamond, and could attract the publicity that would go with it, gold baby cribs and so on.”

  “Which attracts the attention of the underworld.”

  “Something like that.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know—perhaps the stone is ‘evil.’ I had it blessed by a priest, and I like to think it’s brought me good luck. I’ve had some of that, too, you know.”

  “You’ve got it better than some people I know.”

  “They say that three hundred years ago the blue diamond was stolen from the eye of an idol in India. Marie Antoinette wore it as a necklace…and it was stolen in the aftermath of the revolution.”

  “Well, once she was guillotined, Marie would’ve had a hell of a time keeping the thing on, anyway.”

  She laughed; the first time. A good laugh, full-throated and as rich as she was. “Legend has it you’re not supposed to even touch the thing. I don’t encourage my friends to handle it, and for years I kept it away from my children.”

  “That sounds like you do take the curse seriously.”

  “But I don’t really. Hell, I’ve grown casual with it. I do love the silly thingamabob. I wear it almost all the time.”

  “I don’t see it now.”

  “Don’t you? Haven’t you noticed? Mike’s wearing it today.”

  The Great Dane lifted his head at the sound of his name and looked at me like I was the dumbest shit on the planet. He had a right to feel highfalutin, for a hound, considering the simple necklace of “rhinestones” looped around his stiff collar bore the most famous diamond in the world, an indigo blue stone, in a diamond setting, about the size of a golf ball. It winked at me.

  So did Mrs. McLean.

  “Stay for dinner, Mr. Heller,” she said, rising, “we’ll have drinks and talk of Gaston Means and kidnappers and ransom money, afterward.”

  17

  The butler, Garboni, showed me to my room, so I could freshen up before supper. It seemed I was staying overnight.

  “People may talk,” Mrs. McLean had said, as we exited the sun porch, taking my arm rather formally, as if she were attired in the latest Hattie Carnegie creation and not a housecoat, “but hell, let them. I hardly think with a staff of twenty, and sixty rooms, I need worry about you compromising what little remains of my virtue.”

  “Like the white slaver said to the schoolgirl, you can trust me, Mrs. McLean.”

  She smiled at that. “You’ll be staying in Vinson’s room. It’s been kept just the same, since his death.”

  “You’ve put me in your son’s room?”

  “No. My brother’s. My son’s room has been preserved, as well. It’s a luxury of a house this size. But I never allow anyone to sleep there.”

  Brother Vinson’s room, my room, was on the third floor—and we, the butler and me, went by elevator. I tried to remember when I’d ever been in a private residence that had elevators before, and couldn’t. The hallway Garboni led me down was wide enough to accommodate an el train and still take passengers on from either side. Persian rugs underfoot, brocade wallpaper surrounding me, I gaped like a rube at oil paintings and watercolors that looked European and venerable in their elaborate gilt-edged frames, noting my slack-jawed expression in the mirror of dark-wood furniture that was polished past absurdity. I felt about as at home as an archbishop in a brothel; but like the archbishop, I could adjust.

  Garboni opened the door to Vinson’s room—actually, it was a suite of rooms—and we entered a sitting room a little smaller than the deck of the Titanic. The butler dropped my traveling bag with a clunk.

  “Take it easy, pal,” I said irritably. “There’s a gun in there.”

  His eyes flared a little bit; that threw him. “Sorry, sir.”

  “And here I was getting ready to give you a nickel tip.”

  He took that at face value, or seemed to. “No gratuities are necessary, sir.”

  “I’ll say. Scram.”

  He scrammed; without a word, without even a nasty look. For a burly-looking wop, this bird was pretty easily spooked.

  And so I was alone in Vinson’s digs. Sort of.

  Just me and the stuffed alligator. And the two sets of armor. And the waist-high ivory elephant. And the six-foot bronze horse. I sat on a plush red couch with a half dozen red pillows, the sort of thing you might find yourself sitting on in a San Francisco whorehouse, and took in the goddamnedest, godawfulest assembly of mismatched junk I ever saw. A Navajo blanket covering a table; an oversize anchor clock on the wall; a portrait of a Madonna and Child; a Hindu bust; a combined bookcase and gun case; seven pieces of old armor on the wall and a shield, too; a carved bellows; several red throw rugs; a slinky-looking sofa that looked like something a Turkish harem girl might lounge on. Vinson might’ve been dead, but his bad taste lived on.

  The bedroom itself was almost spartan in comparison—a bookcase filled with Horatio Alger, a cabinet with mirror, a single bed of rough rustic wood that seemed a relic or reminder or something of Colorado.

  I used the bathroom—I had my own private one, no bigger than your average Chicago two-flat—and, as Mrs. McLean requested, fr
eshened up. As I splashed water on my face, I wondered what to make of this—specifically, of her. She seemed silly but smart; self-absorbed but caring. A vain rich woman in a 98-cent housecoat.

  I didn’t like her exactly—but she fascinated me. And she was attractive; probably ten or fifteen years older than me, but what the hell—older women try harder. Even wealthy ones. Especially wealthy ones.

  The room had its own phone, which would allow me to check in with Lindbergh and Breckinridge at my convenience. On the other hand, I could be listened in on, so I’d edit whatever I said with Mrs. McLean in mind.

  Freshened or not, I wore the same suit down to dinner—I only had two along; in fact, I only owned two—and, for fifteen minutes or so, sat alone under a cut crystal chandelier at a table for twenty-four, at which there were 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.