Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (13 page)

“Jo is adamant about protecting James’ reputation from the ‘stigma of mental illness,’ which she felt would be inevitable if he was admitted to such a famous psychiatric clinic as Dr. Menninger’s. She talked it over with Truman, on the phone, and he agreed with her and put the Bethesda plan in motion.”

“And you think it’s a mistake.”

“Hundreds of cases of operational fatigue have been successfully treated at Topeka. But what can you do? She’s his wife.”

“And he’s our president.”

“Don’t blame me,” Eberstadt said, “I voted for Dewey.”

That night I returned to Chicago, and the next day Forrestal was admitted to Bethesda. (When his plane landed, he had refused to disembark until the airport had been cleared of “all Air Force men and Jews,” a request that was not fulfilled.) On April 11, the newspapers finally reported the former Secretary of Defense was under treatment at the naval hospital for “nervous and physical exhaustion.” In covering the explosive story, the press showed restraint, for the most part.

With the exception of Drew Pearson, who made a feast of the news, distorting Forrestal’s behavior in Hobe Sound into hourly suicide attempts and constant raving about the Reds. Forrestal was a “madman” who’d had access to atomic bombs, and Pearson wondered in his column and on his radio broadcast just how gravely the secretary’s insanity had jeopardized national security.

It was typical Pearson: bombastic, overstated, cruel …

… and a damn good question.

Southeastern New Mexico, this part of it anyway, was not what I had expected. I was beginning my trip to Roswell with a detour, heading up Highway 70 in yet another rental Ford (a green one), but cutting over at Alamogordo, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes out of El Paso, to take Highway 82 with a village called Cloudcroft as my destination. I was in the foothills of the Sacramento Mountains, and on the winding eighteen-mile drive, past roadside produce stands peddling apples and cider, I climbed five thousand ear-popping feet, scenic overlooks frequently presenting themselves, views of sprawling desert dotted with sagebrush, yucca and cacti from a forest thick with pine, blue spruce and aspen; it was like seeing Mexico from Canada. From certain overlooks, the glittering white sands that gave White Sands its name were in amazing evidence, as if snow had fallen in the desert.

The more typical drive to Alamogordo—at one point crossing through a plateau-bounded basin—had been hot and dry, my cotton knit yellow-and-brown T-shirt and brown tropical worsted slacks sticking to me like flypaper (the T-shirt a Navajo pattern purchased at Sears in Chicago, to help me fit in out here in the wide open spaces). The brim of my straw fedora was snugged down, but the sun hadn’t bothered me—I wasn’t even wearing the sunglasses I’d brought along, enjoying the endless skies, which were a clear, rich, unthreatening blue, the occasional clouds looking unreal, like an artist’s bold brush-strokes. The lack of glare, however, didn’t keep that dry heat from turning the Ford into an oven, even with the windows down.

Now, up in these mountains, I found myself rolling the windows up; it was getting chilly, the shadows of evening creeping in like friendly marauders. I had to slip my tan notch-lapel sportjacket on when I pulled over by the road to watch the setting sun paint the desert more colors than an Indian blanket—a gaudy one, at that.

It had taken Drew Pearson almost a month to decide to send me to Roswell looking for flying saucers. I’d been back in Chicago, running the A-1, with both Washington and Outer Space filed under Bullshit in the back of my mind. My agency was doing fine; after a postwar lull, divorces were on the upswing again and personnel investigation was holding steady, while our retail credit work for suburban financial institutions remained the backbone of the business.

“I figured when I didn’t hear from you,” I told Pearson, “you were taking a pass on the little-green-men mission.”

“I received a document relating to that matter.”

“Could you be a little more vague, Drew? I almost understood you.”

“I can’t be specific on the telephone, you know that!”

“I thought you were calling from a pay phone.”

Which was Pearson’s usual habit.

“I am. But I suspect every pay phone in Washington is tapped.”

“Say, I understand there’s a nice room open next to Forrestal in Bethesda, if you want that paranoia of yours looked at.”

“I’m fortunate you don’t charge per witticism, Nathan.”

“What you pay is already pretty funny. So what got you off the dime?”

“… I’ve received a document that appears to be a briefing to the President on the formation of that …
magic
group.”

“You mean, Majestic Twelve.”

“… Yes. Nathan, please … a little discretion.”

“See, Drew, once you mention receiving a briefing document for the President, this whole discretion thing kinda goes out the window.”

Pearson sighed, but when he continued, he dropped the coyness if not his imperious manner: “I have all twelve names, now, and they’re all credible—people like Admiral Hillenkoetter and General Twining, commanding general at Wright Field.”

Hillenkoetter was head of the CIA, and Wright Field was significant because that was where Marcel had said the wreckage of the saucer had been taken.

“If this is a hoax,” Pearson said, “we have a very knowledgeable practical joker at work.”

“So you want me to investigate Major Marcel’s story,” I said.

“Yes. In particular, I’d like you to talk to the witnesses who claim they saw the crashed craft and the bodies of the crew.”

“Isn’t that the part of the country where they smoke locoweed?”

“Well, there’s smoke, all right, Nathan, but not necessarily from locoweed. And where there’s smoke, there’s—”

“Mirrors…. What’s the latest word on Forrestal?”

“Making good progress, they say.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

Defensiveness edged his tone. “I don’t wish the man any ill, personally. Just politically.”

“Then why don’t you let up on him?”

“What I write and say isn’t having any effect on Jim Forrestal’s state of mind. My sources inside Bethesda tell me he isn’t allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio and all communication from the outside is strictly controlled. He may be insane, but I’m confident the nation is strong enough, stable enough, to hear the truth, to have the answers.”

Pearson had been asking the questions in his column and on the air:
Why had Forrestal’s malady not been detected or acted upon sooner? Who in our government was responsible for concealing this danger to our national security? And to what extent was Forrestal’s medical treatment being compromised by public relations considerations?

Now dry sarcasm colored his voice. “Do you know where your former client’s room is?”

“No.”

“The sixteenth floor of the Bethesda tower. Doesn’t that sound like just the ideal place to keep a potential suicide?”

“More like the ideal place to help keep him away from the press,” I admitted.

“Or maybe they’re isolating him for yet another reason.”

“What would that be?”

“Who knows what drugs they’re pumping into him, or what sort of mind-control magic they’re up to? That hospital is a hotbed of CIA shenanigans, you know.”

“Bethesda.”

“Yes. And if my sources are to be believed, the CIA—Forrestal’s own ‘baby,’ which is a nice irony—is doing research with drugs, electric shock, hypnosis…. Nathan, I just want you to understand—I’m not the villain here.”

“Neither is Forrestal.”

An operator’s voice came in to let Pearson know that he needed to feed in some more coins to keep this conversation going.

After the music of the dropping coins had ceased, Pearson said acidly, “You’re already costing me money. Will you go to Roswell and do this job?”

“Sure, but I want a five-hundred-dollar retainer, in advance, nonrefundable.”

“What if you only work three days?”

“It’s a minimum fee, Drew. I never chase flying saucers for under five cees.”

“… All right. I’m going to send you a list of names that Marcel has given me, with some rudimentary background information. It’ll come Special Delivery, with your retainer check, and your plane tickets. Can you go out there next week?”

I could, and I did. Of course that miserly son of a bitch sent me the cheapest way he could: on a charter flight of retired schoolteachers going to Carlsbad Caverns. At El Paso, the charter group boarded a bus and I rented the Ford. It was a wonder Pearson didn’t expect me to tag along with the teachers and then hitchhike to my first stop.

Sleepy little mountain-nestled Cloudcroft (pop. 265) had the near ghost-town look of off-season, its downtown storefronts no different than in an Illinois or Iowa hamlet; but from a perch overlooking this slumbering resort community loomed a wide-awake ghost of another sort.

The hotel known as the Lodge seemed to have been transported from another time—say, Queen Victoria’s—and another place—the Swiss Alps, maybe. The grand old railway inn was an architectural aberration, a rambling three-story gingerbread chalet—wooden, not adobe, painted gray, trimmed burgundy, with gabled windows, glassed-in verandas and a central copper lookout tower. The shape of the structure was distinct against the New Mexico sky, which at night was a deeper blue but no less clear, with stars like tiny glittering jewels set here and there in its smooth surface, purely for decorative effect, the full moon casting a ghostly ivory luster upon the mansionlike building, whose windows burned with amber light.

Lugging my Gladstone bag, I moved through the covered entryway, pushing open double doors decorated with stained-glass windows, and entered into a two-story lobby that was at once cavernous and cozy, its dark woodwork highly polished, its hardwood floor worn, plants and flowers everywhere, from potted to freshly cut, a world of elegant antiques and hand-beveled glass and sepia lighting; it was as if I had walked into a daguerreotype.

“We have your reservation, sir,” the assistant manager said numbly, at the check-in counter. He was a guy in his late twenties with short-cropped prematurely gray hair and a scar over his left eye; he was pleasant enough but had an all-too-familiar look, the postwar equivalent of what we used to call the thousand-yard stare.

“Which theater?” I asked.

“Huh?” He flashed a nervous smile. “Pacific.”

“Me too. I helped remodel Guadalcanal.”

“At least you had some ground under you—I was on a carrier.”

“Listen, Mac, you got any suites available?”

“Just one; we’re underbooked, and even off-season, the suites get snapped up.”

“But you do have one?”

“Yes,” he said, but shook his head, no. “The Governor’s Suite. It’s pretty expensive—it’s where Pancho Villa, Judy Garland, Conrad Hilton and Clark Gable’ve stayed.”

“Together?”

That made him chuckle; he looked like he hadn’t chuckled in a while.

Pushing my hat back, I scratched my head. “I have to do some interviews and I’d rather not do them in a public place, like your bar or restaurant—”

“It’s fifty a night.”

“Christ, I just want a room, not stock in the joint. Never mind—my cheapskate boss would stick me with the bill. I’ll muddle through with my five-dollar room …”

“… It’s just the one night?”

“Yeah.”

“Take the bastard,” he said. He had a tiny smile as he handed me the key. “You gonna eat first?”

“Think so.”

“Leave your bag. I’ll get it to your room.”

“Thanks, Mac.”

“A warning, though …”

“Yeah?”

“The Governor’s Suite is Rebecca’s favorite room.”

“Who’s Rebecca?”

He raised the shrapnel-scarred eyebrow. “Our resident ghost. She was a chambermaid, murdered by her jealous lover here, back in the thirties.”

“No kidding. Was she … is she … good-looking?”

“They say she’s a gorgeous redhead.”

“What the hell—I always wanted to lay a ghost.”

I tipped my hat to him and headed over to where leather armchairs were grouped about a large carved-wood-and-stone fireplace; New Mexico or not, it was chilly enough for a fire, flames lazily licking logs. Only two of the comfy chairs were taken, by a couple I’d spotted when I came in. The glow of the fire lent the pair a golden patina that made them seem a part of that old photo I’d walked into.

They were seated next to each other, but not saying anything much, watching the fire like a disaffected married couple watching television. These were obviously my interviewees: they fit the descriptions Pearson had provided, although the woman’s didn’t do her justice, as she’d been pronounced merely beautiful.

In her late twenties, a petite, painfully pretty thing, sitting with her hands in her lap atop a small black patent-leather purse, Air Force nurse Maria Selff looked a little like Dorothy Lamour only better, and instead of a sarong she was wrapped up in a simple but shape-hugging short-sleeve powder-blue frock with Spanish-style white embroidery on the bodice. Her heart-shaped face was blessed with large, luminous, long-lashed dark blue eyes, a strong yet feminine nose, and full, cherrylipsticked lips, stark against her milky white complexion, starkly lovely next to the lustrous black hair of her shoulder-brushing pageboy.

This is what the boys overseas had been fighting for, what pilots had painted on the nose of their planes, what dogfaces had pinned up in their barracks and foxholes, what Varga and Petty had imagined and God had finally accomplished. And yet her manner was shy, even demure.

Her male companion was out of his league, but then most men would have been, even those that weren’t—as Glenn Dennis was—a mortician. Smelling of Old Spice, which was better than formaldehyde, Dennis was of medium height, slender, twenty-five maybe, with short brown hair, heavy streaks of eyebrow lending the only distinguishing feature to a pleasant, oval face; he struck me as rather mild and unassuming, a rather typical small-town merchant, even if he was dealing in death. He was duded up in a Western shirt, tan with brown trim and cuffs, with a bolo tie and crisply pressed stockman’s slacks—trying to be worthy of her, the poor sap.

“Mr. Dennis?” I asked.

He looked up sharply, stood, nodding, extending his hand. “Yes, sir. You must be Mr. Heller.”

“I must be,” I said, shaking the hand, and motioning for him to sit back down. “Miss Selff? Nathan Heller.”

“Oh my,” she said, looking up at me like a frightened child, covering her mouth with a hand. She began to tremble, and averted her eyes from mine.

Usually I have to work at it awhile, before getting a reaction like that out of a woman.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Is something wrong? Did I—”

She was shaking her head, still turning away from me, holding up a hand, calling a momentary halt. “No, no … you didn’t do anything … I’m the one who’s sorry …”

Goddamn, she was crying! Fumbling with her purse, finding a hanky, she dabbed at her eyes, sniffled, and regained her composure.

“You … you just reminded me of someone, that’s all,” she said. “It’s a rather startling resemblance, and I’m afraid it just … threw me a little.” She smiled, embarrassed. “Please sit down, Mr. Heller.”

I nodded to her as I took the chair beside Dennis. She got her compact out of her purse, checked her makeup—it was fine—then returned it to her purse and her purse to her lap and her folded hands to their patent-leather altar.

I appreciate your cooperation, Miss Selff … Mr. Dennis,” I said. “I know this was a difficult decision …”

“I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said. Her voice was a fluid alto, still quivering slightly from the odd emotional outburst. “I’m putting all of us in harm’s way, here.”