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.
“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!”
“The suspect list, you mean?”
“Call it that if you like.” Forrestal reached behind him for his wallet and withdrew a check.
He held it out so I could see it: a three-thousand-dollar retainer for the A-1 Detective Agency.
“Nate, find out who wants me dead.”
I took the check. “Jim … this is awkward, but there’s something I have to raise. Doesn’t all this seem a little—familiar, to you?”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
“That job I did for you, before the war—for your wife? She thought ‘they’ were out to get her, too, from the Commies to the household help.”
“That is an interesting coincidence,” he said, nodding somberly. “Of course, there’s a major distinction.”
I was putting the folded check into my wallet; mine was not to reason why, mine was but to keep my business afloat. “Which is?”
He shrugged. “My wife’s a lunatic.”
And he dipped his fingertips in the water glass and patted the moisture on the thin dry lips.
2
Back when the rest of the District of Columbia was swampland, Georgetown—in the city’s furthermost NW section—was a booming colonial seaport. Despite the lovely landscaped acreage of Georgetown University in its midst, the village had declined into a run-down near-slum by ’33, when FDR’s New Dealers and Harvard brain trust types had arrived on the scene, looking for lodging. These pillars of social conscience soon displaced much of the village’s Negro populace, and ramshackle former mansions that had housed ten or twelve colored families were renovated into suitable quarters for one wealthy white clan. Negroes were driven out of their timeworn wooden frame houses and crumbling stone cottages and weathered brick former slave quarters, which were quaintly though elaborately remodeled into dwellings befitting liberal white folk.
Now, in 1949, Georgetown was Greenwich Village gone to graduate school: within these reconditioned slums dwelled professors, artists, congressmen, and cabinet members.
But what these latter-day carpetbaggers hadn’t anticipated was the ancillary impact of this transformation: tourists. Picturesque postwar Georgetown’s once sleepy streets (some of which were still cobblestone) now bustled with tour buses and the sidewalks (some of which were still brick) teemed with Kodak-wielding explorers, seeking signs of their country’s bygone days.
In from the hinterlands on safari, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Buck (and all the little Bucks) trekked through a jungle of shaded streets, seeking the big game of formal mansions on tree-flung manicured lawns, and the smaller game of cozy cottages set flush against sidewalks. In the commercial section—mostly M Street and Wisconsin Avenue—Great White Hunters from Nebraska and Idaho could take a breather from the chase and duck into cozy cafes or charming little antique shops or bookstores in ancient houses with brand-new storefronts.
The hordes of rubberneckers were undoubtedly a pain in the ass for the locals, but manna from heaven for yours truly. Though late March was hardly the height of tourist season, there were plenty of out-of-towners gawking at Georgian mansions, refurbished stables and antebellum houses for a detective on stakeout to blend in with on this sunny Saturday. The thunderstorm that yesterday had pummeled the Chevy Chase Club’s golf course was now a few puddles, replaced by blossoming honeysuckle and magnolia announcing spring and welcoming visitors.
I tooled my dark green rental Ford down M Street, where I left the car in a parking garage near the Francis Scott Key Bridge; I walked away humming “The Star Spangled Banner,” jaywalking across to 34th Street and—pausing once to take in the dramatic view of the canal and the Potomac at my back—trudged up its steep hill.
Washington was a suit-and-tie town if you were a native, but I was a tourist in a pencil-stripe blue rayon short-sleeve shirt, darker blue garbardine slacks and a tan felt fedora. Falling in behind a honeymooning couple from Dubuque (eavesdropping is second nature to the paid snoop), I turned left onto Prospect Street; the lovebirds and I crossed to the right-hand side of the street. The bride was a curvy little brunette, by the way; the groom … I don’t remember.
Their destination—and that of any number of other Washington wayfarers—was a weathered gray-painted brick colonial house with white trim and shutters and authentic period decor. Tours were available and a gift and coffee shop was inside, a stone bench outside. When I wasn’t on foot, scouting the neighborhood, the coffee shop and the bench were my home for the surveillance.
The coffee shop in particular was perfect, with its generous window view of the big house cater-cornered from here. The plump fiftyish colonial-costumed gal who managed the coffee shop (and who cheerily negotiated me up from a sawbuck to a double sawbuck for the privilege of hanging around most of the day) informed me that 3508 Prospect Street was known as Morris House, built in the 1700s and once owned by a naval commander of that name.
Another naval commander—the former Secretary of the Navy, in fact, who was the current Secretary of Defense—lived there now. Forrestal and his wife had only been in that Woodland Drive house near Rock Creek Park a year or so before moving into this impressive, dignified near mansion with its trim brick walls and exquisite Georgian detailing. The front was well-proportioned, sitting above the sidewalk on a low,
stone basement story, and the west wing had been turned into a garage; but its most distinctive feature was an octagonal tower that had no doubt once allowed the naval commander named Morris to keep watch on his fleet.
In back of the house were well-tended terraces that fell toward the Potomac, a view that could be enjoyed from New Orleans-style balconies whose iron grilles and leaf-and-grape design were sheer French Quarter. Beyond the terraces, hugging the waterfront, were the ramshackle shacks of some of Georgetown’s remaining colored residents; I doubted the tour buses pointed these out or that many Brownie snapshots got taken.
Of course I couldn’t see the rear view of the Forrestal house from my window seat in that coffee shop, or the bench out front, either. Periodically I walked the area, as the point of this exercise was not to maintain surveillance on Forrestal but to ascertain whether he was the subject of surveillance. This meant a careful, surreptitious assessment of any peddlers, vagrants, street cleaners, laborers or other invisible members of the landscape; plus checking out second-floor or higher windows, and parked cars.
Throughout a long Saturday morning, neither my periodic reconnaissance of the neighborhood nor my across-the-street observation turned anyone or anything up. Despite my suspicion that Forrestal’s fears were a stress-induced unconscious imitation of the symptoms of his wife’s earlier mental breakdown, I operated from the assumption that he really was being watched. I took him seriously. Or anyway, I took his three-grand retainer seriously.
This was an atypical day for Forrestal. Any other Saturday, he would have been at his Pentagon office; he was a fourteen-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week workhorse and what little leisure time he had was spent on the golf course at Chevy Chase or Burning Tree, or in the company of women other than his wife. It seemed to me if somebody was trying to kill him, the husbands of the married women he slept with were more likely candidates than Zionists or the CIA.
Today, however, my client was home. There was no work to do at the office because tomorrow was his last day as Secretary of Defense. His wife wasn’t home, either—she was at their farm in Duchess County, New York; this was not atypical, as they’d been living more or less separate lives for some time now. But Forrestal indicated he and Jo would be “meeting up” at the Island Club resort in Hobe Sound, Florida, later in the week, for a “post-retirement wind-down.”
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