Majic Man nh-10

by Max Allan Collins

  Majic Man

  ( Nathan Heller - 10 )

  Max Allan Collins

  Max Allan Collins

  Majic Man

  But shrieks that fly

  Piercing and wild, and loud, shall mourn the tale….”

  -Sophocles, translated by William Mackworth Praed

  “I am a victim of the Washington scene.”

  -James V. Forrestal America’s first Secretary of Defense

  The leaves were turning, but a humid summer heat hung on, a nasty, sticky reminder that our nation’s capital-with its languorous “y’all” cadence, profusion of shade trees, and palatial private homes-was still a provincial Southern town, right down to the squalor of its colored slums. The strict segregation here made my Chicago look like a pillar of racial equality, and even worse, there was no air-conditioning.

  Getting around Washington in my blue two-door rental Ford sedan was a mystery not easily solved even by Nathan Heller, President of the A-1 Detective Agency (corner of Van Buren and Plymouth in the Loop, second floor). Laid out like spokes on a wheel around the hub of Capitol Hill, the primary sections of the city were labeled after the compounded cardinal points of the compass-NW, SW, NE and SE.

  But only that NW corner of the city seemed to count, everything interesting crammed into it, from movie palaces like Loew’s Capitol to department stores like Garfinckel’s, from restaurants like Olmstead’s to hotels like the Ambassador, where I was staying. Along NW’s 16th Street and Massachusetts Avenue were sixty or so embassies and chancelleries, not to mention various union headquarters and trade associations. The closest thing to D.C. having a Main Stem was NW’s F Street where 14th Street crossed it; but even there, any night including Saturday, the lights were dim, sidewalks rolled up, most restaurants closing by eight p.m.

  The only action was the occasional cocktail lounge, like the Ambassador’s High Hat; first-class hookers and bored government girls made it easy to get cheaply and/or casually laid in that town; or so I understand (besides which, bubbly blonde Jeannie who worked at the Farm Credit Administration has nothing to do with this story).

  Many of the important politicians who didn’t live in suburban Virginia or Maryland lived in NW, including most congressmen, as well as the client who’d summoned me here-James Vincent Forrestal, who rented a big colonial house on Woodland Drive, behind the swanky Shoreham Hotel and overlooking the leafy vastness of Rock Creek Park.

  From a modest Irish Catholic background, Jim Forrestal had stormed the Anglo-Saxon bastion of Wall Street to become a key player at the powerful investment banking firm of Dillon, Read amp; Company, eventually becoming president. In 1940 he traded that million-dollar-a-year position for a one-dollar-a-year job as one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s administrative assistants. Not long ago Forrestal had been appointed Under Secretary of the Navy, and was currently applying his considerable managerial skills to mobilization and production.

  This was the second job I’d done for Forrestal this year. The first one was a freelance Naval Intelligence job, which even today is classified; despite that mission’s failure, I had apparently impressed Forrestal to the degree that he’d chosen to hire me again.

  A butler tried unsuccessfully to take my hat and showed me to a book-lined study, where Forrestal sat behind a massive mahogany desk, leaning back, smoking his pipe, a thick, brownbindered document in his hands like a hymnal. The desk was littered with file folders and loose paper, as well as several stacks of imposingly thick books (Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years by Carl Sandburg), mingling with a banker’s lamp, framed family photos, pipe rack-and-humidor, candy jar, and ashtray.

  Forrestal was as tidy as his desk was cluttered: three-piece Brooks Brothers double-breasted gray worsted, gray-and-blue striped four-in-hand tie. My navy-blue tropical suit from Sears was lightweight and, theoretically, cool; but I was working up a sauna sweat, the windows closed, the chamber stuffy with the memory of stale pipe smoke. Forrestal seemed aloof from such petty matters as climate.

  I approached the waiting chair opposite Forrestal, who rose and flipped the binder onto the desk, extending his hand. Surprising power resided in the small man’s grip, a fact he tried a little too hard to demonstrate. Standing perhaps five inches shorter than my six feet, Forrestal-slender, fit, late forties-draped himself in the controlled dignity of the statesman, but any air of elitist intellectualism was offset by the battered features of his spade-shaped face, with its broad flattened nose (he’d boxed at Princeton) and lipless slash of a mouth over a ball-like cleft chin.

  “Thank you for coming, Nate,” he said, fixing his intense blue-gray eyes on me.

  “I wouldn’t have,” I admitted, settling into the hard captain’s-style chair, “if your telegram hadn’t specified this was personal.”

  His mouth seemed faintly amused around the pipe stem. “Not interested in government work?”

  “No. And I hope this wasn’t a ruse to get me back working for Navy Intelligence …”

  He shook his head. “This is a private matter, Nate … though when we get into this war, I may call on you again-to serve your country.”

  There wasn’t a war, not yet, so I just asked, “What sort of private matter?”

  “My wife,” he said, and he turned one of the framed photos toward me. “Josephine.”

  It was a rather exotic photo, dating I guessed to the late twenties or early thirties: a raven-haired beauty in an Oriental-pattern frock clutched a large reflective glass ball, like an absurdly oversize Christmas ornament.

  “Well, she’s lovely,” I said.

  And she was: a lanky, elegant woman with large dark eyes and bee-stung lips in an almond-shaped face, the dark hair bobbed in the Jazz Age fashion, a pale beauty in the manner of Louise Brooks or the early Myrna Loy.

  “She’s still quite lovely,” he said, with all the warmth of a scientist describing a microbe. “Jo is an unusual woman. Unfortunately, at present, she’s like a fine Swiss watch whose mainspring has been too tightly wound.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you, sir.”

  The gray-blue eyes stared blankly at me for a few moments, then he said, matter-of-factly, “Let me share a bit about her background.”

  In my business, I talked to plenty of husbands with cheating wives or otherwise troubled marriages, and no matter how hard they tried to suppress it, the emotion showed through. Not this guy.

  “Jo’s a Southern girl, and well-bred,” he said, gesturing with pipe in hand, “but she’s always had a rebel streak. She didn’t finish college, rather became a Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl. The editor of Vogue met her at a party, was impressed by her wit and charm, and soon Jo was modeling, then writing a monthly column.”

  That explained the photo: it could easily have been snipped from those smart, pretentious pages.

  “I met her at a party myself and, like that Vogue editor, was impressed,” he said. “Witty, fashionable, sharp as a tack…. I’d never met anyone quite like her. Never have since.”

  Some admiration had crept in his tone now, but still no emotion or, for that matter, affection.

  I asked, “How long have you been married?”

  “Since nineteen twenty-five. We have two sons.” He turned another of the framed photos toward me, displaying two handsome dark-haired lads perhaps seven and ten, wearing short-pants school uniforms with ties and caps, attire no more humiliating than getting tarred and feathered.

  “Nice-looking boys,” I said.

  He nodded and turned the photo back his way, never mentioning them by name. To call this guy a cold fish was to give a dead mackerel a bad rap.

  “Jo did much better when we lived on Long Island,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chai
r, puffing at his pipe. “She’s a wonderful horsewoman, a frequent prizewinner, and in Manhattan she was able to pursue her various other interests … theater, fabrics, flower arrangement, interior decoration.”

  “This was back in your Wall Street days.”

  He nodded, then shrugged, barely. “I was busy with my work and she was content to run with her circle, to ‘21’ or wherever. Of course, even before I met her she had quite an array of unusual friends-George Gershwin, P. G. Wodehouse, Eddie Cantor, Bob Benchley, Jack O’Hara.”

  I tried not to look impressed.

  “So you’ve gone your separate ways for some time now,” I said, trying to lay the groundwork for the inevitable suspicions of infidelity I’d surely been summoned to confirm.

  “Yes, and we’ve both liked it that way. The problem is … well, actually, Nate, there are two problems. The first is this town … Washington, D.C. It’s been an enormous strain on Jo, trading in Long Island and Manhattan, horse shows and cafe society, for this dreary parade of politics.”

  This didn’t seem to be heading where I expected.

  Forrestal was shaking his head, somberly. “Such a different social milieu, here, such a narrow focus-the cocktail and dinner parties in this town don’t dwell on the arts, it’s all public issues and campaign talk.”

  “Noel Coward and Cole Porter don’t come up much,” I said.

  “Not as regularly as Robert Taft and Wendell Willkie.” This dry reply was surprisingly close to humor. “Jo’s dislike of Washington has exacerbated her other problem … drinking.”

  “She had that problem before your move to D.C?”

  “Yes-only not to this degree. Not to where it was affecting her … mental capacities.”

  So that was it: Jo Forrestal was drinking herself into the laughing academy.

  I asked, “How’s all this manifesting itself?”

  The slash of a mouth flinched in something that wasn’t exactly a frown but sure wasn’t a smile. “I’d prefer you speak to Jo and learn for yourself. She has a job for you.”

  I frowned. “She has a job for me.”

  He pointed with the pipe stem. “Yes, and I want you to take it, and take it seriously. If you don’t investigate thoroughly, if we only pay lip service to her concerns, we would be courting disaster.”

  Now I was completely confused. “What concerns?”

  But he would say no more; he wanted me to hear it from Mrs. Forrestal’s lips.

  And I did, the following morning, only not with her husband around. Forrestal was otherwise occupied, off rebuilding the Navy’s fleet or something. The heat hadn’t let up and I was looking like a tourist in my maize sportshirt, tan linen slacks and brown-and-white loafers as I made my way toward a specific picnic table in Rock Creek Park, as instructed.

  On my way from where I left the rental Ford off the intersection of the parkway and New Hampshire Avenue, I passed a white marble statue of a heroic figure poised on tiptoes with arms outstretched, as if about to dive over the landscaped bank into the nearby river, where no boats-pleasure or otherwise-disturbed the glassy surface. A memorial to the victims of the Titanic disaster.

  I was settling in on the bench at the rustic table, wondering if I’d just encountered an omen, when the gently building sound of hoofbeats announced the arrival of my client’s wife. On the bridle path just below the slope of this picnic area, Jo Forrestal trotted up, or rather the black stallion she was astride did. She pulled back on the reins of the sleekly beautiful animal, bringing it to a stop, and swung her leg over, stepping down with the grace of a ballerina and the confidence of the experienced horsewoman.

  Her white blouse with black scarf and black riding breeches and boots bespoke a chic simplicity, her black hair longer than in the vintage Vogue photo, and just as the horse was shaking its mane, she did the same with hers, the black blades of her hair shimmering into place at either side of her pale oval face.

  Slender, regal, eerily reminiscent of cartoonist Charles Addams’ Morticia, Mrs. Forrestal walked the horse to a nearby signpost that advised no littering, and tied it there; the stallion promptly deposited several road apples at the sign’s base, whether a token of defiance or sheer illiteracy on the animal’s part, who can say?

  She strode confidently toward me, removing her black leather riding gloves, then extended a slender hand, which I took and shook. Like her husband, she had a firm grip, but she didn’t try so hard.

  “Jo Forrestal,” she said. Her voice was low and melodious. “And you’re Mr. Heller.”

  We were close enough that I would have caught liquor on her breath, if it had been there: nothing. Of course, maybe she was a vodka gal.

  “Yes,” I said. “But why don’t we make it ‘Nate.’”

  “And ‘Jo.’” A smile tickled lips that were wider than the Clara Bow rosebud of the Vogue photo.

  “Step into my office,” I said, gesturing across the picnic table. She sat opposite me, the wind whispering through the row of smoke-colored beeches that stood nearby, disinterested observers.

  “Surprisingly cool here,” I said, “for as hot as it’s been.”

  She was a handsome woman of forty but looked every year of it; the dark, magnetic eyes had sunken, and drink had etched tiny lines in what was still a fine face.

  “It’s always cool in this park,” she said. “Lovely year ’round.” She gestured toward the colorful wild-flowers hugging the feet of the beeches.

  “Your husband said you love to ride,” I said. “Must be a godsend to have this park so near your home.”

  She nodded. “Thirty miles of bridle paths, even a practice ring and hurdles. Saving grace of this goddamned town.”

  “I gathered from Mr. Forrestal that you’re not wild about D.C.”

  “I hate this fucking hellhole.”

  I was glad I was sitting down; such coarse language was unexpected from so refined and stylish a lady. Shit, what was I to think? On the other hand, she was a former chorus girl.

  “Do you have a cigarette on you?” she asked suddenly.

  “Sorry, no. I don’t smoke.”

  “No bad habits, Nate?”

  “Not that one.”

  She thought that over, then said, “Jim tells me you’re from Chicago.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I went to the University of Chicago-briefly.”

  I grinned at her. “So did I-the same way.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know-’24 maybe? Kinda lost track.”

  “You were just after me, youngster. I think it was ’20 when I ran off to New York. There was a town.”

  “Chicago or New York?”

  “Take your pick. Either one is Utopia compared to this shitbucket.”

  These occasional profane eruptions, from so chic a source, seemed calculated to me; she seemed to want my attention. Well, she already had that-her husband had paid for it.

  “This burg does seem a little dull,” I admitted. “There’s more nightlife at a monastery.”

  Her eyes and nostrils flared. “You are so very right! No theater, no fashion, no art! No one to talk to, or anyway no one worth talking to. Nobody but these hypocritical fucking pompous politicians and petty fucking public officials with one hand in your pocket and the other on your ass.”

  From over at the signpost, the stallion whinnied, as if underscoring its mistress’ displeasure.

  “Okay, then,” I said. “It’s a dull town. We got that much established.”

  She laughed a little, mildly embarrassed. “Sorry. I guess I should’ve brought my cigarettes.”

  “What’s really bothering you, Jo?” I asked gently. “Why do you need a detective?”

  She swallowed and the confidence vanished; suddenly she seemed trembly as a bird, and the melodious voice took on an unexpected shrillness.

  “It’s my boys,” she said. “Michael and Peter. They’re going to kidnap my boys.”

  “Who is?”

  “I’m … I’m
not sure. This is going to sound crazy, Nate.”

  “Try me.”

  “Jim’s made a lot of enemies. You know, everybody talks about the Nazis, Hitler this, Hitler that. But in the great scheme of things, they’re nothing.” She clutched my hand; squeezed. “It’s the Reds we have to worry about, Nate-the Reds!”

  “The Russians, you mean.”

  “Yes, but more likely their … minions.”

  “Have there been threats?”

  “No, but they follow me. They listen to everything I say, they’ve tapped the phones, bugged our house. Why the hell d’you think I wanted to meet you in the fucking park?”

  I thought, Because your house isn’t air-conditioned?

  But I said, “Wise precaution.”

  She was shaking her head; the black scythe blades of hair swung. “But it’s more, so much more than just the surveillance…. I’ve always been sensitive, Nate. Do you believe in extrasensory perception? Psychic powers?”

  “Sure,” I lied.

  The big dark eyes got bigger, brighter. “Well, I’ve had dreams … vivid dreams. And I have good intuition, I can sense danger, the way … an animal can. Like a horse knows when to rear up.”

  “Instinctively.”

  “Yes! And Michael and Peter, they’re just boys, they’re so helpless … Michael’s thirteen, Peter eleven, they’re off at private school, at Aiken School … that’s in South Carolina.”

  “And you sense they’re in danger.”

  “Yes. But not just them … me, Jim, my family, my friends … any way they can get to us. There’s so much treachery all around us.”

  “What sort of treachery?”

  She frowned, turned her thoughts inward. “I sense it, but also I catch them behaving suspiciously.”

  “Who?”

  “The household staff, for one.”

  “I see.”

  “You need to investigate all of them! And Jim’s assistants at the Navy Department, and I’ll make you a list of my newer acquaintances …”

  “Why them?”