The shrillness made me sit bolt upright as if from a bad dream. Phone calls after midnight are never good news. And few people knew I could be reached here, so it must be serious.
“Hello?” I said. Yes, it was a question.
“Mr. Heller,” a quavering mid-range male voice said. I didn’t recognize it. “Nate? It’s Frank.”
Frank the fuck who? I thought, sleep-bleary.
“Yes, Frank,” I said, playing along.
“I just got home from the retreat. Sorry to call so late. I felt I had to. Needed to.”
Frank Olson.
I reached over and clicked the lamp back on. “No, that’s okay, Frank. What’s up? Is everything all right?”
“No, I … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. Should have waited.”
He sounded bad—flustered, upset, though not drunk or anything.
“Frank? You still there?”
“Yes. Nate. Mr. Heller. I’m so sorry, but I … I made a terrible mistake.”
“Mistake? What kind of mistake?”
“Really shouldn’t have talked to you. Really shouldn’t have got you involved. Can you just forget it?”
“Forget it?”
“Everything we talked about? Thanks.”
And he hung up.
* * *
The Starlight Roof, accessed by special elevators, perched on the top floor of the Waldorf, overlooking Park Avenue. Under a grill-like ceiling blinking with electric stars, the immense supper club had welcomed princes and presidents, sheiks and movie stars, high society and low celebrities. The bandstand had seen the likes of Glenn Miller, Eddie Duchin, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, but most often (like tonight) Xavier Cugat, whose Latin-themed orchestra was striking in royal-blue jackets, Cugat himself in a white dinner jacket. This was a world of Grecian columns and pilasters, stair railings with flower boxes, antique gold mirrors, and an ocean of a dance floor where couples in evening dress were doing the rhumba, a dance first introduced in Manhattan at El Chico, though no parrot or mounted bull’s head was in sight.
I was in a black sharkskin suit and Bettie wore a simple elegant-looking white dress with one shoulder bare. Her heels were white and so was her purse, a virginal look undercut by her curves and the shocking black of her shoulder-brushing hair.
We sat up a level from the dance floor and we talked over Chateaubriand and Cabernet Sauvignon (wine she was not averse to). She learned of my failed marriage and my son Sam, who would be spending his Christmas break with me in Chicago. I learned of her rough upbringing in a broken home where poverty led to a two-year “sentence” at an orphanage with her sister.
“My daddy was a sex maniac,” she said casually, sipping wine. “He was screwin’ my sister all along, and he messed with me but ah never let him inside of me.”
I managed not to choke on the wine. “That’s awful. Bettie, I’m so sorry.”
“You didn’t have anything to do with it, sugah. Look, ah know some gals get messed up, when they get taken advantage of. Ah got lured into a car and gang-banged when ah first came to the city. Well, not exactly gang-banged—ah told ’em ah was in my period and those dirty bastards forced me to blow ’em, each and every one.”
We were secluded between pillars so I assume no one else heard this frank talk.
“Ah had a husband once, who tried to rape and kill me, not necessarily in that order. So if anybody has a right to be loco in the cabeza over sex, honey, it’s me. But you know what? None of that’s sex. And it sure isn’t love. It’s sick, sick, sick, and ah don’t let a few bumps in the road ruin the rest of the ride.”
“That’s a remarkable attitude you got there, Bettie.”
“Enough talk. Let’s dance.”
We did the rhumba and she was nicely fluid at it, and a lot of wide eyes and smiling faces took her in. She wasn’t exactly graceful, but she so enjoyed herself, that lovely face bursting with joy, that you couldn’t help but watch her with almost as much pleasure as she was giving herself. On the slow numbers, she molded herself to me in a dreamy, cuddly way that Kefauver would no doubt have found obscene. Of course, Estes was a serial adulterer, so who was he to talk? I didn’t recognize her perfume and asked her what it was. She said Max Factor’s Hypnotique and I felt hypnotized all right.
She did the rhumba for me in my room, too, pulling the white dress off as I sat watching on the foot of the bed with just my suit coat and tie off. Underneath there was no fancy lingerie out of Frederick’s of Hollywood—just a white bra and white panties and pale thigh-high nylons that needed no garter belt. But for her white heels and the sheer stockings, she took everything off, doing the rhumba all the while to the memory of Cugat. She kicked off the heels, glancing girlishly over a shoulder at me, and then tugged down the panties. Her bottom was full and round and dimpled, the effect magnified by the startlingly narrow waist, the globes rising and falling individually with the rhumba rhythm. She caught the panties with a toe, then flicked them away, and swung dramatically toward me. Her muff was as black as spilled ink, full, luxuriant, her breasts neither large nor small but beautifully shaped and given perfect display by her prominent rib cage. I must have been gaping like a fool, taking this all in, because she was grinning, eyes flashing, giggling a little.
She danced some more, and then knelt before me.
“See, honey?” she said. “No sick bastard can ruin this for me. Ah like sex.”
Then she unzipped me, unleashed me, and began to suck and suckle the hardness she’d made. Time suspended as the sweet warmth of her mouth went up and down and now and then stopped to suck, for minutes or forever, and she sensed I was close, so close, and drew away with a naughty smile to shake a no-no-no finger at me.
“You don’t get off that easy, sugah,” she said. “Undress. Right now.”
For an eyeblink the naked woman was the dominatrix in leather with whip in hand.
I undressed.
Right now.
My clothes were scattered like shipwreck wardrobe washed on shore. Now she sat on the foot of the bed, watching me. Her eyebrows lifted as I stepped out of my boxers and she smiled wickedly, then slid to the floor and turned her back to me again, kneeling over and leaning against the bed, presenting her dimpled bottom like a gift.
I knelt behind her and bounced again and again against the fullness of that magnificent rump, producing moans of pleasure from us both. Then we moved hand in hand to the bed for some man-on-top action, her head back, the lovely face swimming in a sea of black tresses, eyes rolling back. But once again, right before I came, she squirmed giggling out from under, and turned me onto my back and took over, riding me, riding me, riding me, as if she had a crop in hand, those breasts bobbling in my face and her lush grinding bottom filling my hands, as I plunged again and again into the tight heavenly warmth and wetness of a real woman, not a pinup at all.
* * *
Over the next several days, I wondered if I had botched it with Dr. Frank Olson. Had I pressed too hard for information in the first interview? Had asking for his help getting the file on McCarthy been too soon, or too much? Had I gotten him in a jam because of it? I didn’t call McCarthy’s office to inform him that Olson had bailed out on us, because I feared I’d screwed the thing up, and hoped to remedy the situation.
Toward that end, I tried to call Olson, but that was limited to the evening, since I didn’t know how to reach him at work and wouldn’t have tried him there in any case. Those evening calls I got his wife, Alice, who said Frank couldn’t come to the phone; I kept leaving my number and she kept taking it, but nothing. I read a strain in her voice and wondered if her husband was in a fix because of me.
Shit.
In the meantime, Bob Hasty and I were close to assembling a staff for the A-1 Manhattan branch, including a secretary/receptionist. My work here would soon be done, Chicago beckoning.
I took Bettie out several more times, most memorably to the Stork Club, a place she’d never been, and frankly she was disappointed: “Kind of lik
e sex for the first go, sugah—not quite as advertised, but maybe next time.”
The nightspot, on Fifty-third Street in spitting distance of Fifth Avenue, had never been a favorite of mine, its reputation built as it was on its famous clientele. I was in my sharkskin suit again, Bettie in a baby-blue satin dress that draped her like lucky liquid, as we were allowed past the gold-chain version of a velvet rope and into the small lobby with checkroom and telephone booths, to move by seventy feet of mirrored barroom into the care of a maître d’, who showed us into the main room with its softly flattering lights and mirrored walls.
Despite the good-looking younger upper-class types, the obviously wealthy couples with their jewels and Rolexes, and assorted out-of-towners trying to act like they fit, famous faces belonging to movie stars and Broadway names—the key elements—were conspicuous in their absence.
The only face that was anything approaching famous—other than our own nearly famous ones—belonged to a hooded-eyed, narrow-faced, deeply tanned weasel in a dark suit.
Roy Cohn and a big blonde in a bare-shouldered gown, most likely an upper-tier call girl, sat in a banquette for four. She looked more like his stepmother than a date, as if daddy had gone off to the john and left sonny boy with his new showgirl mommy. A more famous face, Walter Winchell, who was working the room, leaned in and talked chummily with Cohn. I had met Winchell several times but always had to reintroduce myself; Chicago celebrities just didn’t count.
The orchestra was a glorified combo and only passable, but we enjoyed ourselves on the postage-stamp dance floor, or anyway Bettie did. The food, at least, lived up to its rep—filet of sole Almondine for her, shad roe with bacon for me, followed by Baked Alaska.
I had just finished my portion of the dessert when I noticed, across the way, Roy Cohn sliding out of his booth, the bosomy blonde barely noticing. I watched him head out.
“Excuse me,” I said, rising at our small table.
“Take your time, sugah,” Bettie said, still working on her Baked Alaska.
The famous owner of the Stork, Sherman Billingsley, had relegated the men’s room to the third floor, with only a small restroom with a handful of urinals and zero stalls off the main-floor bar. Billingsley, in pursuit of elegance, didn’t want customers stinking up the joint.
Roy had the sparkling white-and-black room to himself. No attendant was present in the relatively small space. I waited till Cohn finished, and he was still zipping up when he turned to me. His eyes flared momentarily.
“This isn’t my office, Heller,” he said, with sleepy contempt. He moved to the sinks and washed his hands.
“I heard different.”
“Did you.”
“The blonde’s a little obvious, Roy. You’re trying too hard.”
He dried himself with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash, then bared his teeth in an ugly smile. “Go fuck yourself.”
I slapped him.
The eyes opened wide and a hand flew to his face, but didn’t land, fluttering like a butterfly over where I’d smacked him.
“I suppose,” he said, softly, “I had that coming.”
“For siccing Costello’s boys on me.”
He nodded.
I sucker-punched him and he went down like a matchstick castle.
“That’s just a taste of what you have coming, Roy. And we haven’t even gotten to the Jewish housewife you framed into the chair.”
“You’re fucking nuts,” he said, mouth and jaw trembling. He hadn’t gotten up. His expression looking up at me was that of a whipped dog trying to summon the courage to bite back.
I kicked him in the stomach and he puked his Cornish hen a la Winchell. Then he was just a contorted, crying fetus in a tailored suit.
I counted on my fingers. “I’ve slapped you. Slugged you. Kicked you. What do you suppose will come next? Stay away from me, Roy. Stay out of my life, and maybe this won’t end with me killing your ass.”
He nodded a bunch of times, still down there. I straightened my tie in the mirror and went out.
Time to head back to Chicago.
* * *
Bettie stayed over at the Waldorf. Before we’d gone out, she’d dropped off an overnight bag at my room, because tomorrow was Thanksgiving, and we’d made plans for what the weatherman claimed would be a crisp fall day, no snow or outright cold. On the docket was making it over to Macy’s to watch the parade wind up, then taking in Kiss Me, Kate at Radio City Music Hall, where the live Christmas show had just debuted. The Empire Room would be open in the evening, to accommodate hotel guests, serving up a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, including postdessert dancing to the Mischa Borr Orchestra, a Waldorf mainstay.
The day began, however, with spontaneous half-awake cuddling that quickly got serious, starting with me in charge till suddenly Bettie was riding me again—in a slow, grinding, romantic fashion that would be the only thing about Manhattan I would really miss—and then the phone rang. Make that the goddamn phone. Still mounted, she paused like a rider taking a moment to take in a western vista while I reached for the nightstand and answered the thing.
“Hello?” I said. Again, a question.
“Mr. Heller?” a female voice said. Vaguely familiar. “I think Frank’s in trouble.”
Alice Olson.
“They took him Monday and he was supposed to be home yesterday, and now it’s Thanksgiving and no word, no sign.”
“Maybe I can help,” I said.
CHAPTER
17
I sat at a small round Formica-topped table in the modest modern kitchen of the Olsons’ ranch-style home, with Alice Olson across from me, the aromas of a Thanksgiving dinner hanging pleasantly in the air. On the kitchen counter were two pies—pumpkin and (her husband’s favorite, she told me) apple, each with a few pieces missing. Dishes were piled in the sink, the carcass of a turkey on its tray. Sounds of television and children’s laughter came from the living room, where Bettie was keeping the kids company. The Olson kids loved her; she was good with them, a smiling angelic vision in a pink sweater, interested in anything they had to say; for once, she was up against somebody as chatty as she was. Three such somebodies.
I’d seen no harm and some possible benefit in bringing Bettie along. I’d promised to spend Thanksgiving with her and she was game for an adventure. At Penn Station, we’d taken an 11 a.m. to Washington, D.C.—tickets were no problem, travel on the holiday itself running light—arriving around four, and renting a car for the less-than-an-hour ride to Frederick, Maryland.
We got there just before five. Alice met us at the door in a cream-color apron and brown-and-gold leaf-patterned-print housedress, saying we were just in time, and we sat down in their little dining room for a Thanksgiving meal where I was the only man at the table, not counting nine-year-old Eric and five-year-old Nils.
Alice told us she hadn’t heard from her husband yet today and had waited the meal as long as she could. That was all she said about it in front of the children, the conversation at the table taken up mostly by questions (and answers) about Bettie and me and our respective families. Bettie spoke fondly of her siblings and her mother (her abusive father notably absent), and I played proud papa relating the extraordinary accomplishments of my five year-old son, who I’d talked to earlier today, long-distance.
The food was typically hearty holiday fare and just fine, the stuffing particularly, but Alice had said, “I’m afraid I can’t offer you second helpings. Have to save some for Frank. He might show up any moment, you know.”
The undercurrent of strain was almost imperceptible, but it was there all right, and now that Alice and I were alone at the little table, under a single hanging lamp, dusk darkening to night out the windows over the sink, the haggardness and worry were all too clear in the long, attractive face.
“You’re very kind to come all this way,” she said, after pouring cups of coffee for us, “and spoil what must have been a lovely day you two had planned.”
“
Happy to help,” I said. “To try to, anyway.”
“The business card I found that you gave Frank—do you mind my asking? You’re not a part of his work, are you? Not someone attached to that in any way?”
“That’s right, I’m not.”
“You’re a private investigator.”
“I am. From Chicago, with a Manhattan branch.”
She was sizing me up and I didn’t blame her. “The other night … did Frank hire you to do something for him? To look into something? I’m just wondering if it has anything to do with … with the strangeness of these past few days.”
“Alice … if may?”
“Certainly.”
“And make it ‘Nate’ or ‘Nathan.’ What Frank approached me about must stay confidential, at least for now. But if there is a connection between the ‘strangeness’ you’ve experienced, and what he and I discussed, know that any efforts I make will be in his … and your … best interests.”
Her smile was thin but better than a frown. “I guess I’ll just have to take you at your word, then. It does seem as though an investigator is exactly what I need right now.”
I sipped the coffee. Out in the other room Bettie and the kids were laughing.
“Tell me about this ‘strangeness,’ Alice. When did it start?”
She nodded, sipped, gathered her thoughts.
“Frank got back from the retreat in time for dinner, Friday evening,” she said, glancing at me occasionally, but mostly staring into her recollection. “I knew something was wrong, right away. He seemed stiff, withdrawn … and he’s usually so outgoing.”
“Where was this retreat?”
“A lodge with some cabins at Deep Creek Lake. Just sixty miles or so from here. It’s not unusual for Frank to go out of town for a meeting, anywhere around the country in fact, even overseas. But this time it was close to home.”
“Is this lodge a place you’re familiar with, Alice?”
She shook her head. “No. I just happened to see the directions he’d been given … for the ‘Deep Creek Rendezvous.’ The slip of paper was right here on the kitchen table.” She pointed between us.
Better Dead Page 22
