Majic Man nh-10

by Max Allan Collins

  Her eyes narrowed. “Isn’t it convenient that they’ve suddenly become my friends at this particular stage? Doesn’t that make your hackles tingle?”

  My hackles were tingling, all right, but I just said, “You’re right-make me that list, it’ll be helpful.”

  “You may find that many of these people … perhaps even all of them … are working together to harm everything near and dear to me. The only person I trust is Jim-and that’s why I asked him to bring somebody in from outside, someone that he trusted. You, Nate.”

  “I appreciate your confidence in me, Jo.” I patted her hand. “And I promise you I’ll give this my full attention. I’m not going to let anything happen to you or your boys.”

  “Or Jim!”

  “Or Jim.”

  “Thank you, Nate …”

  And she half-rose, leaning across the picnic table, and kissed me full on the lips.

  She was gazing at me rather lasciviously, stroking my face as I said, “You’re welcome,” and then she stood, the nervousness gone, the confidence snapping back into place, and strode over to her horse, untied it, mounted and galloped off.

  Now Jo Forrestal was clearly nuttier than a Baby Ruth bar, but her husband had come to the conclusion that the best way to snap her out of this was for me to take her fears seriously, and do a full, for real investigation. Forrestal figured that by demonstrating to her that her suspicions had no basis in reality, his wife would return to reality, herself. I didn’t know whether I agreed with this approach or not, though I did agree with his thousand-buck minimum retainer.

  “This business with the Reds is my fault,” Forrestal admitted to me over the phone. “I’m afraid Jo has heard me rail on about the Communist threat to such an extent that it’s entered into her alcoholic delusions.”

  So I spent a month doing full background checks on Forrestal’s household staff, his assistants at the Navy Department and Jo Forrestal’s new D.C. acquaintances. I also had the house swept for electronic bugs, and kept the place (and Jo Forrestal, and later Jim Forrestal) under surveillance for several days each, to see if anybody else was watching them. Finally I spent a week at the Aiken School in South Carolina where Michael and Peter Forrestal were enrolled. I got to know the boys-sweet, reserved kids-and the faculty, as well. I knew all of this was wheel-spinning, but the money was good.

  And of course I discovered no kidnap plan, no electronic bugs, no Reds under any beds, and nobody conspiring against Jo Forrestal, with one notable, and possibly irrelevant, exception. As a by-product of my investigation and surveillance, I discovered that Jim Forrestal was a first-class tomcat.

  This guy went out with more good-looking women than Errol Flynn, and his crowd seemed to know about it, and accept it. He frequently took babes other than Mrs. Forrestal to afternoon teas or cocktail parties, before heading downtown to one of several assignation hotels; where the Under Secretary of the Navy was concerned, the fleet was always in. If Jo Forrestal had been my client, and this a divorce case, I’d have had the goods.

  When I presented my detailed report to Forrestal (which of course omitted his philandering), I gently brought the subject up.

  “I may be out of line, Jim,” I said, “but your wife’s drinking, and her mental condition, might be her way of sending you a message.”

  “I don’t follow you, Nate.” He was again seated behind his big desk, puffing a pipe, looking wiser than Sophocles.

  “Hey, maybe I’m not qualified to make this call, I mean I’m no head doctor … but if she feels threatened, maybe it’s all the dames you’re bangin’, on the side.”

  That impassive puss of his remained that way. Finally he said, quietly, “I’ve placed my trust in you, Nate. I hope you don’t plan to take advantage of my faith in you with some cheap extortion scheme.”

  “Hell no. You’re paying me plenty. It’s just … you got a smart, good-looking wife. She’s got herself in a mental jam. Maybe what she needs is some attention from the guy she married.”

  “You’re right.”

  “That’s okay …”

  “You’re not qualified.”

  I shrugged, and rose. “No extra charge for the unwanted advice…. You want me to present this report to Mrs. Forrestal?”

  Perhaps my mentioning what I knew about his extracurricular activities colored his judgment, but at any rate he hefted my typed report and said, “No. This will be quite sufficient. Thank you, Nate.”

  Obviously, I’d had occasional contact with Jo Forrestal throughout the investigation, and we’d become friendly, though I’d kept my distance after that kiss she deposited on me, at our first meeting. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when she showed up that night at my room at the Ambassador.

  I also wasn’t surprised she was drunk: I had discovered, during my tenure as a Forrestal employee, that the only time she didn’t drink was when she went out riding.

  She wore a classic black dress, side-buttoned and beautifully draped over her slender curves; the black arcs of her hair barely brushed her shoulders. Liquor didn’t make a weaving wreck of her: the only major indications she was smashed were how hooded those big dark eyes were, and how exquisitely foul her mouth got.

  Still in the doorway, she said, “I read that feeble fucking excuse for a report of yours.”

  I was in T-shirt and slacks, just getting ready to shave and go out for supper. “Jo, I did a thorough job. Nobody’s trying to kidnap your boys; nobody’s trying to hurt you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and brushed by me. I had a small suite, and the outer area boasted a couch and a few chairs, as well as a wet bar with a single bottle of Ronrico rum and some warm Cokes, and a table where I could work, my portable typewriter and various field notes still arrayed there. She went immediately to the bar, fetched the ice bucket and thrust it into my arms.

  “Fill it,” she said.

  I went out and down the hall to an ice machine and filled the bucket and came back; fixed two water glasses of rum and Coke and ice, and joined her on the couch, where she sat, smoking.

  “You disappoint me,” she said, taking the drink.

  “The Reds aren’t out to get you. Honest.”

  “You didn’t dig deep enough. You didn’t look close enough.”

  “I dug. I looked.”

  She clutched my arm-my bare arm. Her nails, which were painted blood red, dug into my flesh. “They’re insidious, Nate. You’ve got to stay on the case.”

  “There’s no case, Jo. This town is just getting to you.”

  “Fucking town!” She gulped at the rum and Coke, then gulped at it two more times, finishing it. She stabbed her cigarette out and stalked over to the wet bar and was making another (with damn little Coke), as she said, “Jim’s the only one I can trust. Jim, and you.”

  Why did I have her trust?

  She settled in next to me, answering my unspoken question. “The same instincts that tell me who to suspect, tell me who to trust. And I trust you, Nate.”

  “Jo, nobody’s after you. Really. Truly.”

  “Nate, you have to help me….”

  And she kissed me. There was urgency in it, and something that might have been passion, and I felt her arms slip around me.

  “I need you, Nate.” She pressed my right hand to her small firm left breast. “Please help me.”

  This time she put her tongue in my mouth, and she was a lovely woman, but she was drunk, and she was nuts. Plus, she was my client’s wife.

  On the other hand, the asshole was catting around on her, so it would serve the bastard right….

  “No,” I said, pushing her gently away. “Jo, we’re not going to step over that line.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, pressing against me, slender fingers finding their way into my hair, a giddiness working itself into her voice. “My husband wouldn’t mind-we’ve always had an open marriage, Jim and I. We’ve both always been fiercely independent! Free spirits….”

  As free spirits went, Jo was
in one hell of a cage, and her pipe-sucking Brooks Brothers husband was an unlikely candidate for tree nymph.

  Besides, in shadowing both of them, I’d seen Forrestal score with half a dozen dames in under two weeks, and Jo’s assignations were strictly with booze bottles.

  So I pulled away, rose, poured her another drink, and stuck to my story: nobody was after her or her boys. An hour-and three drinks and six cigarettes-later she seemed to be listening to reason.

  She was shaking her head, staring into her sickness. “But these dreams-what you say are delusions … they’re so vivid, Nate. The feelings seem so real.”

  “The feelings in you are real,” I said, and took both her hands in mine and looked right at her, made sure she was looking back at me. “Listen-let me tell you something about myself that I don’t tell just anybody.”

  She smiled sexily; and she was sexy, bonkers or not, drunk or sober. “You’d share something personal with me, Nate? Something private?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I told her about my father killing himself with my gun.

  “He was an old union guy,” I explained, “and he hated the cops, he hated the system, but I managed to get myself on the police department, and it ate him up inside. Later on, when he found out I lied on the witness stand, for money, he used my nine-millimeter to blow his brains out. And I found him like that, at his kitchen table.”

  Her eyes weren’t hooded, now. “Oh, Nate …”

  “Anyway, I had some problems sleeping after that. I saw a guy, what they used to call an alienist.”

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “Yeah. And it helped.”

  “You think … you think that’s what I should do?”

  “Yes. Talk to somebody like that, who can help you sort out the truth from the bullshit.”

  She just sat there quietly for the longest time; and suddenly the former Vogue model seemed like a little girl, a kid.

  And in a kid’s tiny voice, she said, “All right. I’ll do it.”

  Then she kissed me again, and I might have reconsidered my noble stance where bedding her was concerned, but the truth is, I had just enough time to still make my date with Jeannie from the Farm Credit Administration (who maybe had a little to do with this story, after all). So if my conscience kept me from sleeping with Jo Forrestal, that conscience was blonde.

  And that would have been the end of it, if it hadn’t been the beginning.

  1

  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 amp; 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?”