Flustered, Forrestal said, “This is beyond me …”
And Truman warmly clasped the deposed secretary’s shoulder and said, “You deserve it, Jim.”
God knew what Forrestal read into that remark.
After much applause, and many impromptu tributes, Forrestal did not make a thank-you speech. The papers, reporting this event, found Forrestal’s tight-lipped non-response in keeping with the innately emotional complexion of the occasion.
While Forrestal was busy getting honored (having already been fired), I spent the day with two key people in his life: his wife and his archenemy.
I met Drew Pearson at ten a.m. on the third floor of the Metropolitan Club, a venerable, subdued bastion of respectability on Connecticut Avenue. A colored waiter in a starched white coat served us eggs Benedict; the dark-paneled room was sprinkled with selected bankers and executives doing business over breakfast.
“At noon this place is jam-packed,” Pearson said, sipping a glass of orange juice. He was immaculate in a well-cut gray suit with gray-and-blue tie, the tips of his mustache waxed, sharpened. “You can’t turn around without bumping into a former Secretary of State or a top diplomat.”
“How is it that you’re a member?”
I knew an exclusive club when I saw it; this reminded me of Chicago’s Tavern Club.
“Oh I’m not,” he laughed, his smile turning his eyes to slits, as he took my dig in stride. “They draw the line at only two types of members: Negroes and journalists. But I’m on the approved permanent guest list.”
“I heard your broadcast last night,” I said, sipping my orange juice. “Thanks.”
Pearson had kept his word: no mention of Forrestal’s unstable mental condition; no mention of Forrestal at all, in fact.
“I held up my end of the bargain,” Pearson said, buttering a muffin. “What did you learn from Major Marcel?”
I told him Marcel’s story, reading from notes I’d taken after the interview. As the fantastic aspects of the tale accelerated, Pearson’s expression shifted from amused to absorbed to astonished.
“What do you make of all this?” he asked.
Our breakfast had been cleared away; we were having coffee.
“Marcel seems sincere enough,” I said, “and he did not appear to be deranged, or deluded. And he was reluctant to give me any secondhand information. All of that is a plus.”
“Do I detect, in your tone, the presence of a minus, as well?”
I nodded. “The guy’s in intelligence work, for one thing, which makes him a ripe candidate for carrying misinformation. He’s awfully high-placed to be spilling his guts like this.”
“But he has credible motivation to talk,” Pearson said. “If he’s being truthful, then his government ordered him to go along with a deception that made him look an utter fool who mistook an ordinary weather balloon for the wreckage of a flying saucer.”
“Listen to yourself, Drew. Think about your own credibility, using a term like ‘flying saucer’ in a sentence as if you take the possibility seriously. Major Marcel is a skilled intelligence officer, remember, fresh out of a war where propaganda and misinformation were common currency.”
And yet his eyes glittered with the possibilities. “But if it’s true, Nate, why … this is the biggest story since Jesus Christ …”
“What does your nose tell you?”
Pearson’s motto, famously, was: “If something smells wrong, I go to work.”
Now his eyes had hardened, studying me, deadly serious, even though his smile was wry. “You’re a professional bloodhound, Nathan. What do your olfactories tell you?”
Our waiter returned to refill our coffee cups, the rich aroma drifting up.
“I’m just not sure,” I said, stirring some sugar in. “The guy seems legitimate to me. If he were telling me a story that didn’t have all this Buck Rogers shit in it, I’d buy him wholesale. Hell, retail.”
“If the government recovered an aircraft from outer space,” Pearson said melodramatically, “it might have access to new technology that could make the atomic bomb look like a popgun.”
“Quit writing your column out loud; you’re jumping to a preposterous conclusion.”
His eyebrows climbed his chrome dome. “Am I? Suppose, as Marcel indicated, there were aliens found, as well? Do you know the implications, the ramifications? Social, political … religious?”
“Print that, why don’t you? See how seriously you’re taken, after.”
He sighed and nodded. “And, as we both know, that could well be what this is all about: discrediting me.
“The only thing you might do,” I said with a shrug, sipping my coffee, “is send me to Roswell to poke around a little. Talk to these other sources that Marcel mentioned.”
His eyes slitted again. “How much would that cost me?”
“Who cares, if it’s the biggest story of the millennium? A hundred a day and expenses.”
He frowned, staring into his coffee cup. “I’ll consider it.” Then he looked up, arching an eyebrow. “You know, Nathan, if this is true-if there is a Majestic Twelve group in the government, that Forrestal is a part of-it could go a long way toward explaining the man’s mental state.”
“How so?”
“What if he’s been faced with a threat from the skies?”
I smirked. “Little green men to join the Reds he’s already frightened of?”
Pearson painted a picture in the air with a splay-fingered hand. “Think about it: a recovered flying saucer, advanced technology-maybe he thinks creatures from outer space are trying to kill him. Maybe they are!”
I laughed, grinned. “Definitely put that in your column. You’ll be in the padded suite next to Forrestal’s.”
He shook his head, returning my laughter. “It does sound ridiculous…. Let’s just put it aside, for now at least. But, uh, should I decide to explore this further … you are willing to make the Roswell trip?”
“As long as it’s in a train or a plane,” I said, sipping at my coffee cup, “and not one of these.”
And I tilted my saucer.
We left it at that, and to Pearson I’m sure I seemed indifferent about whether he sent me to New Mexico or not; but in truth my curiosity was piqued.
And Pearson was right: if the government had recovered-and covered up-technology from beyond the stars, the possibility that Forrestal’s condition was related to that remarkable discovery could be very real. Considering that the guy was under stress anyway, suffering from a world war’s worth of physical and nervous exhaustion, being confronted suddenly with the existence of creatures from another planet just might be … taxing.
I didn’t mention the subject to Jo Forrestal, however; she seemed only marginally more stable than her husband, as she prepared for their trip to Hobe Sound, Florida, and I supervised a sweep of their home for electronic bugs.
My A-1 Agency and Washington’s Bradford Investigations supported each other in their respective cities, and two of their men took much of the day combing the big house from basement to watchtower, garage to garden. Electronic surveillance was never my specialty, though, and I spent more of my time with Jo Forrestal than with the Bradford boys.
The Filipino houseboy, Remy, had let me in, and informed me that the bug hunters had beat me there.
“Men in kitchen,” the skinny little man said. He seemed kind of wild-eyed, put out by the intrusion.
I moved past half a dozen suitcases that were lined up next to the second-floor stairway-for the Florida trip, no doubt-and padded on into the kitchen, which was fairly small for such a big old house, and had been remodeled a gleaming white, cupboards and all. The two Bradford dicks were searching high and low, to the displeasure of the Negro cook, who was pacing out back, smoking and muttering.
Bob Hasty, whose last name was an inaccuracy, looked up from the black-patterned white linoleum where he was on his hands and knees, checking the floorboards, looking like a cat after a mouse. Both he and Jack R
andolph, who was standing on a kitchen stool, checking the light fixture, were dressed in tan jumpsuits that looked vaguely military.
“Bowing and scraping in my presence isn’t really necessary, Bob,” I said. “A respectful tone will do. You could avert your eyes, maybe.”
“Blow me, Heller,” the round-faced Hasty said with a grin.
“Seems to me you’re in a better position for that.”
His lanky partner Randolph, checking the light fixture, was cackling over our witty exchange.
I asked him, “How’s it going, Jack?”
“Clean so far,” Randolph said. “If I get electrocuted, by the way, it’s gonna cost you.”
“Time and a half,” I said.
Bob, who had gotten to his feet, was brushing himself off. “Nothing so far. I swept the house with a field-strength meter … clean as a whistle. Jack checked all the phones.”
“Checked at the junction for a black box,” Randolph said, “came up empty. Phones themselves seem clean-no inductive pickups, no ‘suckers,’ no replaced transmitters … but we’re still at it.”
“If there are bugs present,” I said, “they could be very sophisticated-espionage quality.”
“We’re going over every floorboard,” Hasty said, “every electrical fixture in the place. But I think we’re on a fool’s errand.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “And nobody’s better at that than the Bradford agency.”
“Go to hell, Heller,” Hasty said with a grin, which then faded. Whispering, he said, “Say, what’s the deal with the lady of the house?”
“What about her?”
“Well I think for breakfast she put a little orange juice in her vodka.”
Randolph, still up on his stool, looked down at me wide-eyed. “She told us if we fucked anything of hers up, she’d have our balls. In that very language.”
“She had her hand on my ass at the time,” Hasty said.
So they had met Jo Forrestal.
“Well, Bob, it is a very cute ass.”
And I left them to their work.
She was coming down the front stairway, so slender she seemed tall-which she wasn’t-looking quietly elegant in a white blouse and black slacks. One hand casually stroked the banister as she came, the other hand held a tumbler of clear liquid and ice that I doubted was water. More than ever, she reminded me of the hostess of the house in the Charles Addams cartoons.
“Nate Heller,” she said, cheerfully. “You fucking bastard.”
“Nice seeing you again, too, Jo,” I said.
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I added, “You’re looking lovely as ever.”
She did and didn’t: the pale oval of her face, the large dark eyes, the handsome features, were all still in evidence, but more pronounced, as if time had made a caricature of them; and though she hadn’t gained much weight, she had the double chin that years can give anybody. Her hair was still black, but artificially so, soft curls clinging to the side of her head, the length in back hairnet-held.
“Why thank you, Nate,” she said, and beamed, and slapped me, hard.
Then she clip-clopped past me, in her black high-heel sandals, into the spacious living room with its Duncan Phyfe furnishings, where she plopped into a textured cotton-and-silk-damask blue-green lounge chair and curled her legs up under her, sitting like a teenage girl.
I plodded in, rubbing where my face burned, and asked, “What did I do to deserve that greeting?”
She shrugged, sipped at her tumbler. “Maybe it’s because I trusted you and took your advice, and ended up getting shock treatment. Y’suppose that could be it?”
I sat on the nearby plump beige sofa. “I’m sorry about that. I just thought they’d have you talk to a shrink; I didn’t know they’d go the Frankenstein route.”
“Do you have to work at it?”
“What?”
“Talking like Humphrey Bogart in some cheap movie?”
I tossed my fedora on the coffee table. “Well, first of all, he’s trying to talk like me. Second of all, Bogie doesn’t make cheap movies.”
That made her laugh a little, then she frowned and said, “Stop that. I’ve decided not to like you.”
“When are you leaving for Florida?”
She sipped her drink. “I’m going today. Jim can follow me down whenever he likes, or not at all.”
“Why aren’t you going down together?”
Her hooded-eyed, fluttering-lashed expression included a smile that had very little to do with smiling. “We don’t do anything together, Nate, remember? Jim has some banquet tonight, for that horse’s ass replacement of his, Johnson, and then some meeting tomorrow morning. And he wants to make himself available throughout the week, in case he’s ‘needed.’ Do you think they’ll give him shock treatment, too? Or is that just reserved for the ladies?”
“I guess I can’t blame you for being bitter, but I think your husband really does need some help. Or anyway, a good long rest-and maybe a little understanding.”
She laughed, once. “Excuse me while I fucking puke, Judge Hardy! I like you better when you’re doing Bogart. Jim made his own bed; let him fuck and lie in it.”
“Did you ever consider maybe he really is under surveillance?”
Her eyes and nostrils flared as she leaned forward. “You mean, like I was? By the Reds? See, that’s typical; typical! A woman says that, and she’s a goddamn maniac! A man, a powerful man like Jim, well there’s either something to it, or maybe he just needs a little resty-bye. And understanding.”
“Jo, it’s not Jim’s imagination that Drew Pearson’s been out to get him. Is your maid working today?”
“No. It’s her day off.”
“Make some excuse and fire her. The girl’s feeding information to Pearson’s guy, Jack Anderson.”
“What? Fuck!” She flew to her feet and hurled her glass against the wall, narrowly missing a framed Currier amp; Ives, taking a chunk out of the painted plaster. It wasn’t anywhere near me, but I ducked reflexively, anyway.
“That little nigger bitch!” she shrieked. “And to think I treated her like a daughter!”
The Filipino houseboy, summoned by the crash of glass, peeked his head around the corner, observed the cursing Mrs. Forrestal, and disappeared like a turtle into its shell.
She raved and ranted as she crossed the Axminster carpet to a liquor cart, building herself a martini, surprisingly heavy on the vermouth. Then in mid-rant she stopped, turned and said, with no apparent irony, “I don’t mean to be a shitty hostess. Can I get you something to drink, Nate?”
“No thanks.”
“You think I won’t drink alone?”
She was drinking before I got here, but all I said was, “Just a little early in the day for me. Don’t let me stop you.”
“I’d like to see you try to stop me,” she said acidly, strolling back to her chair, sipping from the tumbler. “That fucking Pearson, anyway. You have a gun, don’t you?”
“Not on me.”
She sat again, tucking her legs back under her. “Well, you’re on the job-why don’t you go get it and do the world a favor and shoot that evil cocksucker.”
“That’s extra.”
She laughed hysterically at that, tears rolling down her apple cheeks.
“It wasn’t that funny, Jo.”
“I know,” she said, and her laughter stopped cold, like a switch had been thrown. Her face tightened with rage, but she was controlled as she said, “Do you know what that son of a bitch Pearson said about me? That I was a snob for enlisting Mainbocher! A snob!”
“Who’s Mainbocher?”
“You are hopelessly unschooled, aren’t you? Mainbocher is only one of finest purveyors of fashion in the world, you dumb fucking cluck. And I got him to help me design new uniforms for the Waves! Which are so much more chic than those Wac rags; but that bald bastard Pearson has the balls to criticize me for it!”
I was vaguely aware that Forrestal had attemp
ted to involve Jo, to make her feel she had a role in Washington, and the war effort; and it didn’t surprise me that Pearson had crucified her for it.
Her eyebrows rose and the big eyes got huge. “You know what I was being paid to be a consultant to the Waves? Nothing! Not a red fucking cent! So I quit…. I told Jim he could fight the goddamn war by himself, and Pearson and the rest of the columnists could kiss my ass!”
“Was that columnists or Communists?”
Her expression froze, and then she broke out into brittle, near-hysterical laughter. Holding her stomach, rocking in the easy chair, laughing. I was a riot today. Maybe Jack Benny needed a new writer.
“Oh, I could use you around here, Nate. You would definitely cheer me up. You wanna go to Florida with us?”
“Jim wants me to, but I’m not sure …”
“We have separate bedrooms down there, just like up here. You can slip into my room late, and fuck me till my eyes pop out of my head.”
“Well, that’s nice to know …”
“And no one the wiser, not that anyone would give a shit.” She rose and wobbled over to me and sat in my lap. “Of course, there’s always right now-upstairs. Jim won’t be home till after that banquet tonight, and I’ll be long gone, on my way to Florida.”
She was long gone now.
Her hands were locked behind my neck as she wiggled her bottom into my lap. “Or are those awful little men of yours still snooping about?”
The scent of Chanel No. 5, and her still slenderly appealing figure, almost made it tempting, no matter how drunk she was. But in a way I still thought she was bluffing: those years of “open marriage,” with Forrestal banging half the good-looking broads in D.C., were a one-sided affair. That was my instinct, anyway.
“Jo, you’re a lovely woman,” I said, not exactly lying. “But let’s not rush things.”
“Why? Which of us is getting younger?”
I kissed her, tenderly, and it wasn’t half bad. “Let’s wait for a better moment.”
She shrugged. “All right,” she said, in a small voice, slipping off my lap. But once she got on her feet, she bellowed, “It’s your fucking loss!”
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