Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (3 page)

The Chevy Chase Club was open for golf every day of the year, but the gun-metal sky threatened rain, a muted rumble of thunder promised the same, and only a madman would risk a round on a chill late March afternoon like this.

Make that a pair of madmen, and make me one of them.

I had an excuse, however; I was half of this ill-fated two-some because I was on the clock. No, not a caddy—a security consultant, as they said in the District of Columbia. Back home in Chicago, the term in use was still “private eye,” even if these days I was an executive version of that ignoble profession.

After all, the A-1 Detective Agency was now ensconced in the Loop’s venerable Monadnock Building on West Jackson in a corner suite brimming with offices, operatives and secretaries as well as a more or less respectable clientele. I could pick and choose which cases, which clients, were worthy of my personal attention, and those in that favored category had to be prepared to pay our top rate of a hundred dollars a day (and expenses) if they wanted the head man.

My golfing partner had wanted the head man, all right, but I was starting to think he needed a different sort of head man than the A-1’s president. Specifically, the headshrinking variety.

Longtime client James V. Forrestal—immaculately if somberly attired in dark green sweater and light green shirt with black slacks and cleated black shoes—seemed the picture of stability. I was the one who looked unhinged, albeit spiffy, in my tan slacks, lighter tan polo shirt and brown-and-white loafers, having been encouraged to bring golf attire along, assured I was in for “perfect golfing weather.” Then why were my teeth chattering?

Forrestal carried himself (and his own golf clubs—the caddies weren’t working today) with a characteristic aura of authority, as well as a certain quiet menace; he would have made a decent movie gangster with his broad, battered Cagney-like features, and wide-set, intense blue-gray eyes that could seize you in a grip tighter than the one his small hands held on that three wood.

But on closer examination, the picture of stability started to blur. The athletically slim body had a new slump to the shoulders, his skin an ashen pallor, his short, swept-back hair had gone from a gray-at-the-temples brown to an all-over salt-and-pepper, and the eyes were sunken and shifting now, touched with a new timidity.

On the other hand, there was nothing timid about Jim Forrestal’s golf game. After I’d hit my respectable two hundred yards, Forrestal strode to the tee and addressed the ball and gave it a resounding whack, then almost ran after it, all in about four seconds. Perhaps he was trying to beat the rain—God kept clearing His throat as we traversed the blue-green grass—but I suspected otherwise.

Forrestal played a peculiarly joyless form of golf, striking the ball in explosions of pent-up violence, expressing no displeasure at bad shots, no pleasure at good ones, as if the eighteen holes we were trying to get in were an obligation. He’d outdistanced my drive by fifty yards or so, and stood waiting with clenched-jawed impatience, foot tapping, as I used a two-iron to send my Titleist into a sand trap.

As for me, I hated golf—the game was something I put up with for the social side of business—and had no idea what the hell I was doing here, on the golf course or otherwise. I assumed, of course, this had something to do with Secretary Forrestal’s rather unfortunate current situation. Politics never held much interest for me (the
Racing News
didn’t carry coverage of the D.C. scene); but even an apolitical putz like yours truly knew what had been happening to Forrestal of late.

Plenty had happened in the nine years since I had done that “personal” job for Jim Forrestal. One of Washington’s most powerful figures had, for the first time in a rather blessed life, suffered a humiliating fall from grace. This was the man who had built the vast fleets of the Navy from a mere four hundred to over fourteen hundred combat vessels; who had—despite his extensive administrative duties—made dangerous front-line inspection tours in the Pacific, landing under fire at Iwo Jima.

In 1944 he’d became Secretary of the Navy, and, following Roosevelt’s death, President Truman appointed the highly regarded Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense, despite Forrestal having fought against the creation of such a position, in the belief that the Army, Navy and Air Force should each be their own boss. After Truman’s unexpected victory over Republican Tom Dewey last November, Forrestal alone among Roosevelt’s holdover cabinet members seemed likely to stay on for the peacetime duration.

Or anyway, that’s what most of the pundits had been saying, with a few key exceptions, specifically a guy who knew less about politics than I did—Walter Winchell—and, more significantly, Drew Pearson, the most powerful left-leaning muckraking columnist in the country.

In his various syndicated columns and on his national radio show, Pearson for over a year had been accusing Forrestal on a near-daily basis of everything from being a personal coward (by failing to stand up for his wife in a holdup, supposedly) and a Nazi sympathizer (because Dillon, Read & Company had done business with Germany in the twenties).

But from a political standpoint, most damning was Pearson’s claim that Forrestal had secretly made a pact with Tom Dewey to continue as Secretary of Defense under a new administration that, obviously, never came to be.

James Forrestal’s resignation had been made public on March 3, and that this action was taken at the request of President Truman was no military secret. Louis Johnson, a key Truman fund-raiser, would take over Forrestal’s position two days from now, in a patronage tradition that was easy for a Chicagoan like me to grasp.

All of which added up to, I was golfing with the most famous lame duck in the United States.

Soon to be a wet one: the sky exploded over us while we were approaching the tenth tee, and Forrestal—the golf bag slung over his shoulder damn near as big as he was—waved for me to follow him back to the white-stone porticoed clubhouse. He’d moved fast, and so had I, lugging my rented clubs, hugging a tree line, skirting the tennis courts; we got drenched just the same. A colored attendant provided us with towels, but we looked like wet dogs seated in the clubhouse bar.

Save for the bartender, we were alone, which was one small consolation, anyway. Forrestal ordered a whiskey sour and a glass of water but I needed coffee, to help me stop shivering.

We sat at a small corner table by windows that provided a front-row seat on the rolling black clouds and white lightning streaks and sheeting rain turning the gentle hills of the golf course into a hellish surreal landscape. Forrestal, hair flattened wetly, sat back in his chair as if he were behind his big executive desk at the Pentagon, calmly sipping his whiskey sour. He looked like the elder of an elf clan, and a wizened one at that. He probably only had ten or twelve years on my forty-three, but looked much older.

“Nate,” he said quietly, “they’re after me.”

I tried to detect humor in his medium-pitched, husky voice, and could find none; no twinkle in the blue-gray eyes, either.

“Well, uh, Jim,” I said, and smiled just a little, “it seems to me ‘they’ already got you. You
are
out of a job.”

“You can lose a job and get another,” he said, and the slash of a mouth twitched in a non-smile. “But a man only has one life.”

Thunder rattled the earth, and the windows; cheap melodramatic underscoring, Mother Nature imitating a radio sound-effects artist.

“Have there been threats?”

He nodded, once. “Telephone calls to my unlisted number at home. Cut-and-paste letters.”

I gestured with an open hand. “But someone in your position always hears from cranks.”

Now he leaned forward conspiratorially, whispering, “Didn’t you wonder why I wanted to meet you here?”

“Hell no.” I waved to the rain-streaked window and the squall beyond. “Beautiful golfing weather like this?”

He dipped the fingertips of his right hand into his water glass, as if it were a fingerbowl, and then raised the fingers to his lips, moistening them gently.

Then he said, “My phones are tapped. Electronic bugs all through my house.”

This wasn’t making sense to me; I sat forward. “Why bring me in from Chicago? Why don’t you call some of your friends in from the FBI or intelligence or something, and do a sweep?”

“That’s who probably planted them.”

I sat back. “Oh.”

He began to shake his head, slowly, his eyes glazed. “We won the war, Nate, but we’re going to lose the peace.”

“What are you talking about, Jim?”

“I’m talking about Communists in government.”

“Communists. In our government.”

He nodded gravely.

“And that’s who’s ‘after’ you.”

His eyes flared. “If I
knew
who wanted me dead, why would I hire you?”

“Who else could it be, Jim? Besides the Communists.”

His whiskey sour glass was empty. He lighted up his trademark pipe, having to work a little to get it going. I was about to repeat the question when he said, “That prick Pearson, for one.”

Lowering his pipe, which was in his left hand, he again dipped the fingertips of his right hand in his water glass and remoistened his lips.

“The S.O.B. made me out a coward, Nate.” He was trembling; I’d never seen Forrestal tremble before, and I couldn’t tell if it was anxiety or rage. “Told a pack of damn lies that made me out a yellow weakling who ran from danger when his wife was threatened! I wasn’t even there, when that robbery occurred….”

“Jim … Pearson’s a newspaperman. All he’s after are stories.”

Forrestal’s hand was clenching the bowl of the pipe as if it were a hand grenade he was preparing to lob. “Pearson is not a mere newspaperman. He’s a crusader—a misguided one—and a pawn of the Communists. Hell, he may be a damn Russian agent; certainly it’s no great stretch of the imagination to see him on Stalin’s payroll.”

“Maybe so. But you’re still out of office.”

His eyes narrowed and the thin line of his mouth almost curled into a faint smile. “… In four years I might assume another one.”

“Under another president, you mean?”

An eyebrow arched. “I mean
as
president.”

It seemed to me, despite my political disinterest, that I had read something about the Republican party courting Forrestal; but looking at this gray-skinned, sunken-eyed shell of his former self, a man seeing Communists under his bed and the FBI in his pantry, I found it difficult to picture his face on a
Forrestal in ’52
campaign button.
In with Jim!
I didn’t think so.

The real irony, of course, the aspect of this that was truly odd and even creepy, was the extent to which this circumstance mirrored that “private” job I’d done for Forrestal in 1940. The parallel was so glaring, so disturbing, I couldn’t seem to find a way to bring it up, to point it out to Forrestal….

In the aftermath of that earlier investigation, Forrestal had told me he’d taken the troubled Jo to see a New York psychiatrist, that she’d been hospitalized with a diagnosis of clinical schizophrenia. Shock treatment had been part of the therapy, and I hated to hear that, because I didn’t believe in that snake-pit shit. I even felt a little guilty about telling her I’d seen a shrink myself; the story about my father killing himself with my gun was true, of course, and I still carried guilt for it. But I’d never lost a night’s sleep and wouldn’t have seen a psychiatrist if voices were telling me to paint myself blue and dance naked in Marshall Field’s window.

And now, almost nine years later, in the bar of the clubhouse of the Chevy Chase Club, with wind and rain rattling the windows nearby, I was seated with Jo Forrestal’s husband—the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America (for two more days, anyway)—who was telling me a story that seemed chillingly familiar.

“You’re a Jewish fella, right?” he asked, out of nowhere, pointing with the pipe stem.

“My father was a Jew,” I said with a shrug. “My mother was Irish Catholic, like your stock.”

He waved that off. “I don’t practice the faith.”

“I wasn’t raised in any church. What’s that got to do with people trying to kill you, Jim?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. “If I was a Jew hater, if I was anti-Semitic, would I hire a Jewish detective? Christ, my secretary is Jewish!”

“I’m still not with you, Jim.”

He wet his fingertips again and patted his lips, saying, “I stood against Palestine, for the sake of my country, and that makes me a Jew hater? It’s bullshit, utter bullshit.”

“The Jews are trying to kill you, too?”

He nodded; beads of water clung to the upper lip-less mouth like sweat. “They could be. It could be the Zionists. Why aren’t you writing this down?”

“I can remember it. Anybody else want you dead, Jim?”

Now the pipe stem jabbed at the air. “Is that sarcasm? I won’t tolerate sarcasm. This is very real.”

“No, it’s not sarcasm,” I said flatly. “Who else wants you dead?”

He pounded the table with a fist. “I don’t know! I just know I’m being shadowed. I know they’ve got the house bugged, the phones tapped. You’re the detective, Heller. Find out!”

“Okay.” I sipped my rum and Coke, casually said, “Let’s start with the other obvious question: why would somebody want you dead?”

“The obvious answer: I know too much.” He dabbed more water on his lips. “Nate, I’ve done some bad things, trying to do good. Sometimes I’m afraid I’ve betrayed my country by trying to serve it…. Once I’m out of office, I’m a threat to all sorts of people.”

I had a sick feeling in my stomach: fear. “If this is tied in with the intelligence community—what’s this new branch called?”

Forrestal flinched a non-smile around the pipe stem. “The CIA.”

“Yeah, a spook by any other name. Anyway, if that’s what this is about, what do you expect a lowly private dick to do about it?”

He jabbed the air with the pipe stem again. “Don’t do anything about it—just find out who the hell is after me! I can call in favors once I know who it is, whether it’s the Zionists, the Russians, American Commies, or that bastard Pearson … and the list goes on!”