“Max Hassel,” he said, breathing hard. “And Max Greenberg.”
“Are you making that up?”
“No! No.”
“They’re both named Max?”
“Yes! Yes.”
“Who are they?”
“Bootleggers.”
They would be.
“Where can I find them?”
“Elizabeth.”
“New Jersey?”
“New Jersey,” he nodded.
“Where in Elizabeth?”
“Carteret Hotel.”
“Be specific.”
“Eighth floor.”
“Good. More names.”
“That’s all I know. I swear to God, that’s all.”
“Hassel and Greenberg are the kidnappers?”
“They engineered it. They didn’t do it themselves. They used their people. People who were selling beer to Colonel Lindbergh’s servants, and the Morrow house servants.”
“Was one of the servants in on it?”
He nodded. “Violet Sharpe-but they just used her. The little bitch didn’t know what she was doing.”
I slapped him. Hard. I slapped him again. Harder.
“What…what else do you want to know?” he asked, desperately.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just want to slap you around some, you fat fuck.”
His cheeks were red and burning and tear-streaked; he looked pitiful, on his knees, the world’s biggest altar boy, caught with his hand in the collection plate.
“If Hassel and Greenberg aren’t for real,” I said, “you’re going to take the lie-detector test again, Means-and you’re going to flunk.”
“They’re…they’re for real,” he said, thickly.
“If you say a word to them, or anyone, about our conversation, I’ll kill you. Understood?”
He nodded.
“Say it,” I said.
“If I say a word to anybody, you’ll kill me.”
“Do you believe me?”
He nodded; there was still red spittle on his face.
“Good. Are you really in contact with the kidnap gang?”
Without hesitation, he nodded.
“Is the boy alive?”
Without hesitation, he nodded.
“Do you know where he is?”
Now he hesitated, but he shook his head, no.
“Who is the fellow ‘the Fox’?”
He swallowed. “Norman Whitaker. A friend of mine. Old cellmate.”
“He’s not in on the kidnapping?”
“No. He’s with me.”
“What’s his function?”
Means shrugged. “Color.”
“Color. What about Evalyn’s dough?”
“I still have it.”
“You still have it.”
“I swear. I really have been trying to negotiate the return of that dear child.”
“Stop it or you’re going to get slapped some more. What’s the extra thirty-five grand for?”
He pressed his hands over his heart. “That was true, all of it…I did go to Chicago, the gang can’t move that marked cabbage…I swear to God.”
I smacked him along the side of the head with the nine millimeter; he tumbled over, heavily, like something inanimate, and the furniture around him jumped.
But he wasn’t out, and it hadn’t cut him; he’d be bruised, that was all.
“All right,” I said, kicking him in the ass. He was on his side. He looked up at me with round hollow eyes. There was something childlike in his expression. I gestured impatiently with the gun.
“Get up,” I said. “Go home. Talk to fucking no one. Wait for Evalyn to call.”
He got up, slowly. His face was soft, weak, but the eyes had turned hard and mean. If he was like a child, in his endless self-serving fabrications spun from fact and fancy, it was an evil, acquisitive child, the kind that steals another kid’s marbles, the kind that steps on anthills.
I’d gone to great lengths to prove to him I was dangerous; but despite his tears and cowardice, Means remained goddamn dangerous himself.
I gave him his hat and, sans slugs, his gun.
“Who are you?” Means said, thickly.
“Somebody you never expected to meet.”
“Oh, really?” he said, archly, summoning some dignity. “And who would that be?”
“Your conscience,” I said.
He snorted, coughed, and lumbered out.
I sat on the couch, waiting for Evalyn. I didn’t have long to wait; she came down the stairs as if making a grand entrance at a ball, despite her dowdy bathrobe. She’d gone around somewhere and come out on that balcony and eavesdropped the whole encounter.
She moved slowly toward me; the shadows of the fire danced on her. Her face was solemn, her eyes glittering.
“You’re a nasty man,” she said.
“I can leave,” I said, embarrassed.
She dropped the robe to the floor. Her skin looked golden in the fire’s glow; nipples erect, delicate blue veins marbling her full ivory breasts, a waist you could damn near reach your hands around, hips flaring nicely, legs slender but shapely.
“Don’t dare leave,” she said, and held her arms out to me.
“Why, Evalyn,” I said admiringly, taking that smooth flesh in my arms. “You’re a nasty girl.”
23
Toward the middle of the next afternoon, uptown in the rail-and-harbor city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a powder-blue Lincoln Continental drew up along the curb of the posh Carteret Hotel. The grandly uniformed doorman moved swiftly down the red carpet in the shadow of the hotel canopy to open the rear right door for the Lincoln’s solitary passenger, beating the chauffeur to the punch. The chauffeur, however, in his neat gray wool uniform with black buttons, was there in time to help the stately lady passenger, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, out of the backseat. She wore a black velvet dress with a large quilted black-and-white scarf tied stiffly, squarely around her neck, and a black velvet conical hat, an outfit whose festive styling clashed interestingly with its mournful coloration; but for diamond earrings and a diamond bracelet on one of her white gloves, Mrs. McLean’s jewelry was uncharacteristically absent. Her thin, pretty lips were blood-red. The chauffeur, a rather handsome young man in his twenties with reddish-brown hair, allowed the doorman to usher lithe, lovely Mrs. McLean into the hotel lobby. The chauffeur, by the way, was me.
I got our luggage out of the trunk of the Lincoln-my simple traveling bag and a big heavy leather number for Evalyn; I told her we’d only be one night, and shuddered to think what she’d bring for a weekend away. I turned our things over to the bell captain, who told me I could for a fee park in the private lot behind a nearby bank. On my way back, on foot, I cased the exterior of the hotel a bit.
The Elizabeth Carteret Hotel was a nine-story, heavily corniced brick building between a massive Presbyterian church and various storefront businesses; the Ritz Theater was diagonally across the way. Narrow alleys were at the left and right of the hotel, with a service-and-delivery-only alley in back, a side entrance with a bellman on the right-hand alley, and no outside fire escapes. An exclusive, expensive hotel, with relatively tight security. I was glad I’d come in undercover.
Evalyn was waiting in the marble-and-mahogany lobby, where businessmen and bellboys mingled with overstuffed furniture and potted plants.
“We have separate rooms,” she said quietly, handing me a key, “on the ninth floor.”
“Adjoining?” I asked.
“No. Traveling together like this, just the two of us, is dangerous. If my husband found out, it could be used against me, in court.”
“I get it.”
“But I have a suite.” Her smile was tiny and wicked. “Plenty of room for company.”
Soon I was in my own small but deluxe room on the ninth floor, getting out of my chauffeur’s uniform and into my brown suit, as well as my shoulder holster with nine-millimeter Browning. I really should have boiled the latter, after sticking it in Gaston Means’s yap, but somehow I hadn’t got around to it. I’d had my hands full since yesterday.
First they’d been full of Evalyn, of course, in her gigantic canopy bed with its pink satin sheets that matched the sprawling bedroom’s pink satin walls. Mike the Great Dane, incidentally, who I hadn’t seen much of this trip, I saw plenty of that night: he slept at the foot of her bed. He snored. I let him.