Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (29 page)

“Figure what out, Mr. Heller?”

“How to stage this. How to kill me. It’s got to look right to your superiors. If they think you murdered Maria and me to cover something up, you’ll have some fancy explaining to do. I mean, there’ll be suspicions about Forrestal’s convenient exit, already. How do you explain two corpses in your kitchen?”

His mouth formed something that was half smile, half sneer. “Maybe the bodies won’t be in my kitchen. Maybe you’ll drag Nurse Selff out to my garage and put her in the trunk of my car.”

I nodded at the wisdom of this. “Yeah, then you could shoot me, push me in there, dump us both somewhere. Maybe make it look like a murder/suicide … lover’s quarrel. Not bad for a beginner, Doc.”

Bernstein stood. Gestured at me with the gun. I came around the table, on the side where Maria wasn’t, and he stood facing me, leveling the gun at my chest, maybe eight inches separating us.

“You know, Doc, you may know a lot about the human mind, but you don’t know jack shit about guns.”

“I know how to squeeze a trigger.”

“Not with a broken finger you don’t.”

And I grabbed the muzzle of the nine-millimeter and twisted it, hard; his howl of pain as his trigger finger broke, jamming against the metal trigger guard, was music to my ears. But he hadn’t let go of the weapon, so I jammed the slide back.

Then his hand loosened and I snatched the gun away as he fell to his knees, clutching his hand, the finger bent at an impossible angle.

“You see, the Browning nine-millimeter is a recoil-operated weapon, Doc. Everything has to be locked together for it to fire, everything has to be lined up perfectly—kind of like the human brain.”

By grabbing the nine-millimeter’s slide and pushing it back, I’d made a jammed weapon out of it. So I slapped its magazine, racked the slide and the weapon was good as new again. Ready to fire. But I had a better idea.

Bernstein sat on the floor, grasping his hand, whimpering, tears streaming down his face.

Kneeling at an angle that kept the fallen, sniveling psychiatrist in view, I took the opportunity to spend a moment beside my beautiful Maria. The vulnerable girl, the hard-as-nails woman, nurse, spy, lovely even in death, even with the black-and-red dime-size pucker in her forehead; I closed her eyes, kissed her cheek and whispered, “Forgive me.”

Then, rubbing the tears out of my eyes, I stood. “Jeez, Doc, we’re both crying. Real couple of he-men, huh?”

Bernstein, cheeks flushed—funny, his face finally had some color in it—looked up at me, the icy eyes red and blinking. “What … what now?”

Keeping the weapon trained on him, I moved to the stove, dropped open the door.

“Now, Doc?” I shrugged, walking back to where he sat, shivering with pain. “Now I’m going to embrace my Jewish side.”

The barrel of the nine-millimeter caught him across the forehead, knocking him out, and I dragged his unconscious form over like a bag of grain and shoved the top half of him into the oven.

Then I turned on the gas.

On a clear, sunny morning in May, after a nineteen-gun salute, the boom of howitzers playing bass drum to the Naval Academy Band’s rendition of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” the Old Glory-draped caisson bearing the casket, drawn by seven gray horses, accompanied by an honor guard made up of all three services, wound its way up the serpentine drive of Arlington National Cemetery.

There, on the Wednesday following his fatal fall, James Vincent Forrestal received full military honors at a ceremony attended by President Truman, the cabinet, an array of Congressional leaders, the diplomatic corps and several thousand friends and associates. A crowd of interested citizens numbering at least four thousand stood behind a velvet rope at the end of the white marble amphitheater, in the chapel of which the President, Vice President and pallbearers including former president Herbert Hoover, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch and Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, attended the service itself, with Bishop Conkling from Chicago presiding.

Jo Forrestal did not attend. She and her sons Peter and Michael, young men in their early twenties, both of whom had echoes of their father in their faces, waited a few hundred yards away, at the gravesite, for a ceremony reserved for family, relatives and close friends.

I’d been invited—by Eberstadt—and was among this fairly small group. Forrestal, of course, had been physically rather small, and the size of his casket reflected this, and was little bigger than a child’s coffin—like the coffins the Air Force had tried to buy from Glenn Dennis at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell.

The air was sharply cool, almost cold, and I stood at the back—immediate family seated on folding chairs, no tent—as Bishop Conkling read from First Corinthians. The little casket was lowered, and the sons threw in the symbolic clumps of earth. We were on an oak-studded knoll overlooking the tranquillity of the gray-blue Potomac and the panorama of government buildings beyond.

A slender, fragile, elegant-looking pale figure in mesh-veiled, stylish black (had Mainbocher designed her a funeral gown?), Jo Forrestal—looking more than ever like Charles Addams’ creation—drifted among the gathering of friends and relatives with her sons in attendance, making introductions when necessary. I shook hands with both boys, who had appropriately shell-shocked expressions.

Jo said to me, “You should have felt at home here today, Nate.”

“Well, uh, yes, you mean with Bishop Conkling presiding …”

“No, I mean Jim got a regular Chicago-style send-off, don’t you think?”

She took me by the arm and walked me a few steps away from her boys; I couldn’t smell any drink on her, but then I never could—vodka was kind to the breath, after all.

“I don’t quite get your drift, Jo …”

Her eyes glittered under the veil; her voice had a brittle edge. “All the pomp and goddamn circumstance, flowers and brass bands, it’s like when your syndicate big shots take one of the boys for a ride, right? Got to have a big show, after the bump-off—to feel less guilty, and fool the gullible fucking public. You must feel at home.”

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it’s not the first time I’ve been at this kind of affair.”

She touched my sleeve with a black-gloved hand. “Jim liked you. I’m sure he didn’t show it, but you were one of his favorites. He felt you were a man’s man … sometimes he felt his … intellectual pursuits were less than … I don’t know … manly.”

“You and Jim turned out a couple of handsome boys.”

“Nate, you may not believe this, but Jim and I loved each other, in our way. I will never forgive those shits for …” And she slipped a hanky-in-hand up under the veil and caught a sob.

“Jo …”

“… never forgive them for sending me out of town. When they killed him. Do you know how that made me look? ‘Mrs. Forrestal was in Paris when her husband fell to his death.’ Cold, heartless bitch. They’re the cold, heartless ones. I told the cocksuckers—you can have your gangster’s funeral, but I’ll have no part of it.”

“You better keep those thoughts to yourself, Jo.”

She smirked beneath the veil. “Why, ’cause I’ll be the next lunatic they stick on the sixteenth floor, near an open window?”

“… Yes.”

She thought about that for a moment, turning her gaze toward the Potomac. From this knoll on the heights of Arlington, we could see in the distance on this clear morning the great dome and the magnificent white marble temples of our nation’s capital.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “What men in public life will do, in the name of the people.”

Then I walked her back to her sons, who stood at the grave-side, standing, heads lowered, at the edge of where the casket had been lowered. That was when it occurred to me: this was the first time—in all the years I’d known them, in the various jobs I’d done for our late Secretary of Defense—I had ever seen Jim and Jo Forrestal together.

The suicide of Dr. Joseph Bernstein—no surviving relatives—was buried in the back pages, with no mention that he had been one of James Forrestal’s psychiatrists, in fact no mention that he had worked at the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. Nobody, not even Drew Pearson, picked up on the amazing coincidence of the two interrelated suicides in one night.

Nobody questioned me. Whether they suspected me or not, who can say? I had wiped my fingerprints from the few surfaces I had touched in Bernstein’s dream house, and had driven Maria’s Studebaker back to the hospital parking lot, wiping it clean of prints. No one seemed to have seen me leave the car there, and get in my own and drive away.

The biggest risk had been leaving the bullet that killed Maria behind; it was lodged, no doubt, somewhere in the woodwork of that house, having traveled at close range through her brain. If anyone had thought to check with the Chicago police department, or probably the FBI—who had that thick file on me, remember—a ballistics match to my weapon might have been possible. The nine-millimeter was a gun I had carried since my father’s suicide, and it had left its own fingerprints, here and there.

I wasn’t worried about it, not when the newspapers carried no word of Maria’s death. She had vanished, like a magician’s assistant. Bernstein, in that harassed way, got mentioned; a psychiatrist was too high-profile to just disappear. A nurse was far less significant. She could do a vanishing act.

That gave me the worst nights, thinking about the family she must have had, somewhere. We never spoke of it, but hell—even I’d had a mother and father. What he had the government told them about their daughter’s death? Where, if anywhere, had her remains been interred? Not on an oak-studded knoll in Arlington, I’d wager.

The only conversation I had with a government official bearing at all on Forrestal’s death was a rather oblique one with onetime Capone nemesis and former Secret Service chief Frank J. Wilson, the evening before the big funeral. The meeting—he’d asked to meet me for a cocktail in the Ambassador’s High Hat Cocktail Lounge—was ostensibly a social one; but soon it revealed itself as business, pertaining to Wilson’s consultant role with the Atomic Energy Commission.

Chatting over beers, Wilson and I sat in a back booth, with the privacy only a boisterous public place can provide. In his dark blue suit and dark-rimmed glasses, and with that stern cleft-chin countenance of his, he didn’t look much like a guy out for a night on the town.

“You should know that the Commission is aware of your inquiries at Walker Air Base,” Wilson said, “and in Roswell…. I understand you were poking around for Drew Pearson, about that so-called flying saucer crash.”

“That’s right.”

“We’d just as soon not see any further attention drawn to that. The incident had its flurry of press interest, at the time, which has long since died down.”

“Since when is the Atomic Energy Commission concerned about little green men?”

He twitched a smile, sipped his beer. “I can clear some things up for you—if you’ll agree to keep quiet. You can’t give this to Pearson. Not to anyone, Nate—not your priest, not your best girl.”

My best girl had been recently shot and killed, and lately everybody had been reminding me I was a Jew; so none of that seemed a problem.

“Okay, then, Frank—just between us girls.”

He held his glass of beer with both hands, as if it were something precious, leaning forward, ever so slightly. “Obviously, that was no flying saucer. There’s a top-secret project … no, that’s not quite right. Actually it’s classified Top Secret A-1, the same national security rating as the Manhattan Project.”

My forehead frowned and my mouth smiled. “And you’re telling me about it? In the cocktail lounge at the Ambassador Hotel?”

“I’m not going to tell you in detail. But the material Major Marcel recovered
was
debris from a fallen balloon.”

“Weather balloon, yeah. Hell, like Daffy Duck says, ‘That’s no military secret.’ The government’s been peddling that sliced baloney since two hours after the saucer story broke.”

Wilson shook his head, no; his expression grave, his voice hushed. “This isn’t a weather balloon … it’s not one balloon at all, but a train of as many as twenty-three balloons, a massive affair designed to climb to high altitudes, for intelligence-gathering purposes.”

“Okay,” I said, as if accepting all that. “If the Atomic Energy Commission is involved, then I can probably guess the kind of intelligence-gathering you’re talking about.”

“You probably can. As for some of the descriptions you no doubt heard, of the strange debris, this balloon train included a very sophisticated new aluminum material, with rubberized backing.”

“Which accounts for the tales of crumple-proof metal from outer space. What about these so-called hieroglyphics people say they saw?”

“That’s a funny story.” And Wilson smiled, having cued himself. “Apparently the radar reflectors were contracted from a toy company, who used some tape they had on hand for reinforcement purposes—with flowers, diamonds, circles, other childish designs … ‘hieroglyphics.’ As for the unbreakable ‘beams,’ they were balsa wood treated with a special-formula glue.”

I sipped my beer. “That is a funny story, Frank. Almost as funny as trained Army Air Force personnel mistaking that stuff for a crashed flying saucer.”

His eyebrows climbed his endless forehead and then made the long trip back down. “That I can’t explain, other than that some of these materials were sophisticated, and differed greatly from the run-of-the-mill balloons that would have commonly come down in the Southwest, which those Air Force people would have immediately recognized…. And that’s all I can say, Nate—other than, as a friend, to ask you to try, to the best of your ability, to quash Pearson’s interest in the Roswell story. It might draw … unwanted attention.”

The implication, of course, was Soviet attention; and my assumption was that these balloons were gathering the data that, oddly enough, Major Marcel at SAC was lately interpreting and collating, regarding whether or not the Russians were engaging in the testing of atomic weapons.

I went along with this, though I’ve always wondered whether straight-arrow Frank Wilson had knowingly passed disinformation along to me. The only way that train of weather balloons might have been involved in the Roswell crash was if that experimental aircraft codesigned by Germans and Japanese had collided with it—which I supposed was a possibility.

Nonetheless, as Wilson had requested, I did dissuade Pearson from pursuing the Roswell tale, informing him that I believed the accounts were riddled with disinformation, and that Majestic Twelve, while it might well exist, did not seem to have been formed to investigate saucers from outer space.

“Was somebody trying to make a sap of me?” Pearson asked over the phone, the afternoon after Forrestal’s funeral.

“That may be the intent, or possibly just a happy by-product of concealing the real purpose of Majic-12.”

“Which is just one of the many secrets—and sins—Forrestal took to the grave with him.”

The bitterness in Pearson’s tone didn’t surprise me; he had taken terrible blows to his reputation—and to his list of subscribing newspapers—by the blame others in the press were heaping on him; it was widely implied that Pearson, via his hounding, had “murdered” Forrestal. The
New York Times
pilloried Pearson for overstepping “the bounds of accuracy and decency,” the
Washington Post
spoke of the columnist’s “below the belt blows”—and this in Pearson’s home paper. (Many years later, Jack Anderson—who would take over the “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column and distinguish himself as Pearson’s successor—would say with regret, “Our hand was surely in this tragedy.”)

“Tell me, Drew,” I asked him, just curious, “do you feel you bear any blame at all for Jim Forrestal’s demise?”

“It was the Navy’s fault—if they’d taken proper precautions, he’d be alive today.”

“There’s some truth in that,” I admitted. “But I thought maybe you could at least scrape up a little pity for the poor bastard.”

“Sorry, no. This was a man who spent all his life thinking about only himself, trying to fulfill his great ambition to be President of the United States. Anyway, is a public official immune from criticism or investigation, for fear his health might be impaired by the process?”

“You know, Drew—I know why you hated him so much, if you’re interested.”

“I didn’t hate him! … Why?”

“He reminded you of you.”

“That’s a despicable thing to say. You know better than most people what that man was capable of, to see that his point of view prevailed.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. You two’re the original ends-justify-the-means twins. There’s only one thing Forrestal has over you, Drew, just one little thing …”

“And what would that be?”

“He had the decency to go out a high window.”

Well, I didn’t get any jobs from Pearson for a while, after that. But we did reconcile, when in later years he mellowed some, as his power dwindled. He accomplished many good things with his muckraking style, including paving the way for modern investigative journalism. One of his many positive accomplishments was to follow up my lead on our government’s collaboration with Nazis, exposing the likes of Luftwaffe Major General Walter Schreiber—who had been involved with medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates—forcing the Nazi general to flee from our shores in 1952. Toward the end of Pearson’s life, when he was receiving accolades for his long, illustrious career, the Forrestal case was dredged up and he suffered another round of criticism, dying of a heart attack in 1969.