Stolen Away

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.”