Stolen Away

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.

In a way, it was okay, because I had to think. I had to figure out exactly what to do about the lead Gaston Means had literally spit up.

The next morning we’d had an egg-and-bacon souffle in a breakfast nook a family of six could’ve lived in. I sipped my fresh-squeezed orange juice, and asked, “Will you stake me to a couple long-distance calls?”

She looked at me over her coffee cup, a bit surprised. “Well, certainly. Something to do with Means?”

“Yeah.”

“What should I do about that scoundrel?”