“I’ve never been in a house with a ballroom before.”
“There are several more upstairs, sir. Not to mention the roof garden.”
“Not to mention that.”
He opened a door just past the fireplace and indicated I should go on in.
The half-circle sun porch I stepped out onto seemed small in comparison to where I’d just been, but in reality was bigger than a suite at the Palmer House. Horizontal golden stained-glass panels above the windows painted the white room yellowish. This whole goddamn house had jaundice.
There wasn’t much furniture: just a few hard-back plush-seated chairs here and there. She wasn’t using one of them. She was standing, staring out at the street, across the snow-smattered and surprisingly meager brown lawn. She was small, and she was wearing a brown-and-yellow plaid woolen housecoat, the kind you could get for under a dollar at Sears Roebuck. Her back was to me, but her hand was turned toward me, away from her, diamonds and rubies on the fingers, a cigarette trailing smoke toward the doves in the stained glass above.
The butler cleared his throat and, with an expression he might have used while disposing of a dead rat by its tail with two fingers, said, “Mr. Heller to see you, madam.”
Her back still to us, she said, “Thank you, Garboni.”
I knew he was no limey.
“Leave the door open, Garboni. I’m expecting Mike any minute.” Her voice was husky; a sensual, throaty sound, two parts sex, one part chain-smoking.
He left us and I stayed planted well away from her, waiting for her to recognize my presence.
She turned slowly, like a ballerina on a music box. She was a morosely beautiful woman, with sad blue almond-shaped eyes, a slender, gently aquiline nose, lips neither thin nor full, painted blood-red. Her hair was short and dark brown, several curls studiously poised on her smooth, pale forehead. The dowdy bathrobe was floor-length but sashed around her small waist rather tightly; silver slippers peeked out from under. She was slim, almost tiny, but her breasts were large and high, a Gibson Girl figure, and she had that kind of face as well. She looked perhaps thirty, though forty was more like it.
She smiled but it only made her eyes sadder. “Mr. Heller,” she said, and moved toward me quickly, extending a red-nailed, bejeweled hand. “So kind of you to come. So kind of Colonel Lindbergh to send you.”
I took her hand, wondering if I was expected to kiss it, which I wouldn’t have minded doing-you got to start someplace. But before I could make up my mind, she tugged me over to one of two chairs on either side of a small glass-topped table where an overflowing ashtray sat next to a square, silver, sleek decorative lighter and a flat, square, silver decorative cigarette case on which “EWM” was engraved in a modernistic flourish.
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.”