Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (16 page)

“Did they have any kind of clothing on? Had the doctors removed any garments …?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t remember seeing anything like that, but frankly, it was all so horrible and gruesome, and I was so overcome with nausea, and the desire to get the hell out of there, I just didn’t pay the close attention I should’ve.”

“I think you did just fine. You came out of there with more details than most people could ever have managed.”

“Well … maybe my nurses’ training came through for me, a little. Nathan … are you humoring me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pretending to believe all this, while you think it’s nonsense?”

“Maria, I don’t know what you saw, but I believe you saw something.”

“Glenn thinks they’re from outer space. He thinks the debris he saw was from wrecked ‘escape pods.’”

“What do you think?”

She frowned, searching inside herself. “I try to make those bodies into humans, possibly human children … features distorted because of long exposure to the high desert … or maybe monkeys. There are rumors of missiles being shot off, at White Sands, with animals—dogs, monkeys….”

I sat forward. “Could they have been monkeys, their hair burned off in a crash? I’ll bet dead monkeys that’ve been out sunnin’ in the desert could smell pretty ripe.”

“I want to believe that’s what I saw. But the anatomy was all wrong … and it was consistent from corpse to corpse.” She shook her head, in frustration.

“All I know for certain is it was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. Do you think I’m insane, Nathan?”

“No.”

“I wish I were as confident of that as you are,” she said, and collapsed into tears.

I went to her, gathered her in my arms—she was trembling all over, bawling like a baby, and I cradled her in my arms, patted her back, rocking her, saying, “It’ll be all right … it’ll be fine … don’t you cry … shush … shush.” She whimpered and sobbed for quite a while, as I held her, and finally it abated, and she relaxed, face against my shoulder, as I kept rocking her.

She was feather-light, when I carried her up the stairs like Rhett Butler whisking Scarlett O’Hara away, only my Scarlett was sleeping, snoring even, a very unfeminine snore that made me smile. The bedroom was decorated in an Early American style, centering around a four-poster double bed with a quilted comforter. I eased her onto the bed, slipped her black pumps off her tiny feet, made sure the pillow was cradling her head comfortably, then eased out of there, switching off the light, padding down the stairs.

Since I hadn’t even bothered to take my bag upstairs, I camped out on a couch downstairs—a Duncan Phyfe number whose carved mahogany and light blue tapestry-style upholstery looked too elegant to be comfortable. I took off my shirt and my shoes, but decided to sleep in my T-shirt and trousers, for decorum’s sake. I threw some more wood on the fire, got it going again, then stretched out on the couch, whose plump cushions proved my expectations nicely wrong; on my back, elbows winged out, I watched the walls and ceiling where flames and shadows did a mocking dance.

Was
I just humoring her? For those blue eyes, what couldn’t I convince myself of? For that Dorothy Lamour figure, what wouldn’t I pretend to believe? I mean, could I really be taking seriously the prospect of outer space creatures with big heads and big eyes and tentacle fingertips, taking a right turn at Pluto and heading for Roswell, New Mexico? What, they could navigate all those asteroids and meteor showers, they could make it safely to earth from the other side of the Milky Way, but those Roswell July Fourth fireworks really threw them, and they panicked, and slammed on the brakes….

Yet within a day or so of when the Army Air Force may have been out recovering those “foreign bodies” from some unknown desert crash site, Major Jesse Marcel was salvaging pieces of strange debris at a nearby ranch.
Something
had crashed in the desert; something important enough for Uncle Sam to go around scaring the bejesus out of those citizens unlucky enough to be witnesses, coercing those good Americans into a terrible silence.

The fire was dwindling, and I was nodding off, when a tiny noise drew my eyes to the stairway and the ghostly figure coming down; in the faint dying glow from the fireplace, throwing long shadows, she moved slowly, as if in a trance, the powder-blue dress wrinkled from her sleeping in it, hiking up a little, her knees and even her thighs showing.

She crossed tentatively toward where I lay on the couch, whispering, “Nathan? Are you awake?”

“For a minute there,” I said, moving onto my side, leaning on an elbow, grinning, “I thought you might be Rebecca.”

She sat on the edge of the couch; the raven’s-wing hair was fetchingly tousled, an improvement on the severity of her pageboy. “Who’s Rebecca?”

“The ghost.”

“What ghost?”

“The one the restaurant’s named after—some chambermaid who was killed by her lover, years ago. This is supposedly her favorite room.”

She smiled a little, but nervously. “You’re just saying that. You’re teasing.”

“No. That’s the story. You know, it’s just nonsense to keep the tourists entertained.”

She seemed oddly troubled by the silly tale, and began hugging her arms again. “That’s so
bizarre….
”

“You’re cold—I’ll feed the fire.”

Thinking that this girl had run into more bizarre occurrences in her time than a stupid ghost story, I went over and put a few more logs on, got some heat and glow going, then returned to the couch, where she was sitting, now; she’d left room for me, and I took the liberty of putting my arm around her.

“We’ll warm you up,” I said, and she snuggled close. “I don’t mean to be fresh….”

But she lifted her face up and her dreamy expression, and her parted lips, gave me permission to get a little fresh, anyway; specifically, to kiss her.

It was a soft, warm, sweet, almost chaste kiss. Almost.

She drew away from me, gazed at me earnestly. Her voice was husky as she said, “It’s so strange … I came down here because I thought … I thought I
sensed
something in that room up there. A presence. Maybe an …” She cut herself off, laughed ruefully. “Now you
will
think I’m crazy.”

“What?”

“… I thought maybe it was an … evil presence.”

“I think Rebecca’s supposed to be a friendly ghost.”

She shuddered. “Well, I don’t want to sleep up there.”

“You want the couch? I’ll go risk the bed …”

“No!” She hugged me tight. “Stay down here, Nathan. Stay with me—all night.”

“Well …”

“Maybe it was dredging up all those … awful memories, maybe that’s what’s got me spooked. But the one thing I know for sure is, I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“All right. You take the couch.” I gestured toward the easy chair by the fireplace. “I’ll pull a couple of chairs together and …”

She patted the couch. “There’s room for us both, don’t you think? I’m not very big.”

Some places she was.

“Okay,” I said, and I lay on my side, against the back cushions, and she lay next to me, her back to me, and we were like spoons, as she nestled her bottom into my favorite place, and I looped an arm around her waist, held her next to me and she snuggled; oh how she snuggled.

“Funny,” she said. Whispering. Maybe she didn’t want Rebecca to overhear. “When I first saw you, I thought
you
were a ghost.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Whose ghost?”

She didn’t say anything. Then I realized she was crying again. Not bawling like before, no racking heaving sobs; just quietly weeping.

Gently I turned her around to face me. “What is it, Maria?”

Emotion tugged at her face. “You look so much like him.”

“Who?”

“… Steve.”

Her husband. Late husband.

Then she was crawling on top of me, kissing me with an urgency that was contagious, and I was on my back as she writhed around on me, the curves of her molding, pressing themselves to me, my hands moving across the back of her, over her rounded bottom, up the curve of her spine, to the buttons.

“Undo me,” she whispered.

With far less fumbling than you’d imagine, I unbuttoned the dress, and she sat atop me and peeled it off the upper part of her, the garment gathering at her tiny waist, revealing a formidable white bra into which considerable engineering had gone, and she asked me to undo that as well, and I did, and none of that engineering had been necessary because the full breasts were capable of standing up for themselves, large nipples dark against the pale rounded flesh, puffy soft nipples that got crinkly and hard under my kisses. I kissed her and kissed her, her salty face, her lips, her neck, her shoulders, and she let me do most of the kissing, as if basking in the affection; then she eased herself off me, and the couch, onto the floor, and stepped out of the dress, a pool of powder blue at her feet. She wore no nylons, no garter belt, no girdle, simply sheer panties, the pubic triangle vividly dark beneath the fabric.

I managed to say, “I’ll … I’ll get something.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s a safe time. It’s safe …”

Maybe she was a Catholic at that, though the nun part was starting to sound doubtful.

Then she tugged down the panties, and the blackness of the untamed tuft between her legs against the creamy flesh was startling. She was a stunning woman, petite but with that Botticelli body, and she stood there with the reflection of flames and shadows flickering crazily on her flesh, a campfire dancing around her.

“Now you,” she said.

I stood and yanked off my T-shirt, got out of my trousers, stepped out of my drawers. I started to take my socks off but she stopped me.

“Leave them on,” she said, with a new wickedness. “It’s dirtier that way.”

This nun concept was definitely flawed.

We did it on the carpet, near the fire, with me on top, with her on top, and then she stuck that heart-shaped bottom in the air and had me finish her from behind, me saying “Oh God,” again and again, her saying “Yes” over and over, building from a whisper to a scream.

And that was just the first time.

“You were wonderful,” she said, as we lay on the couch; she was back in her bra and panties, and I was in my skivvies.

“You … you’re not so … bad … yourself.” I was pretty winded; we won’t go into our respective ages.

“Of course, I don’t have much to go on,” she said, suddenly pixieish.

“Oh? You seemed to know what you were doing.”

“Really? Gee whiz. You’re only the second man I was ever with.”

Then, having kicked me thusly in the head, or somewhere, she fell asleep, leaving me to ponder whether it bothered me or not, playing substitute for that late fighter pilot husband of hers. Had I taken advantage of her, in her distraught state? Gee whiz—was
I
the evil presence she sensed in the room?

Had she mistaken my natural lechery for friendliness?

“Naw,” I said to myself, and fell asleep with her in my arms.

If Norman Rockwell were looking for a classic American small town to represent the Southwest for his next
Saturday Evening Post
cover, he could do worse than Roswell. Under cotton-candy clouds and ball-of-butter sun in a sky so clearly blue that Hollywood simply had to be involved, Roswell and its thirteen or so thousand inhabitants (mostly white, maybe ten percent Mexican and Indian) nestled in a setting of sprawling desert and majestic mountains.

Right down to the manure-rich aroma wafting in from surrounding ranchlands, this was a typical farm community, though distinctly modern, with wide paved streets and flourishing industry (meat-packing plant, flour mill, creameries), and oddly similar to the District of Columbia in its preponderance of shade trees, handsome public buildings and flower-filled parks. Of course in Roswell, it was not granite, but adobe; not cherry trees, but cottonwoods; not memorials, but playgrounds. There was even a Pennsylvania Avenue, with a few Federal-style houses, though mingled with Queen Anne, Tudor, Prairie and more.

In fact, Maria her-Selff (who this morning I had dropped off at her car parked at the recreation area of Bottomless Lake) lived on Pennsylvania Avenue. But I had orders not to come around her place unless it was after dark and she knew I was coming and I left my car parked at least four blocks away and slipped in back. I knew an invitation when I heard one, and—what the hell—it wasn’t like this was the first time I was a back-door man.

Right now, however, the sun was high and hot, the air still and dry, and I had people to see, starting with the sheriff of Chaves County. A risky proposition, walking right up to the local law and introducing myself; wasn’t this the sort of tumbleweed town where they didn’t cotton to my kind around these here parts? Where the man with the badge gave prying strangers a choice between the noon outbound stage or a one-way ticket to Boot Hill? The only proposition riskier would be
not
seeing the sheriff, first.

The Chaves County Courthouse, on Main Street, was a neoclassical tan brick structure dating to 1912, the year New Mexico joined the Union. A green-tiled dome loomed imposingly over a massive entryway, and the interior sported equally impressive Greek-key-design tile floors, brass chandeliers and ornate plasterwork. But the adjacent office of the sheriff proved as shabby and nondescript as is customary, bulletin boards sporting Mexican, Indian and white suspects in unprejudiced array.

I wanted to keep things casual and unthreatening, so I’d dressed like a tourist, in a two-tone shirt—tan with blue collar and sleeves—and lightweight blue twill slacks and two-tone brown-and-white shoes. Taking off my straw fedora and slipping my sunglasses in my breast pocket, I checked in with a thin, young, dark-haired deputy—his name tag said Reynolds—and asked if I could see the sheriff, telling the kid briefly who I was.

“If this is a bad time,” I said, “I can make an appointment. I plan to be in Roswell for several days.”

“In all the way from Chicago, huh?” the deputy said. He had bright eyes and a ready toothy smile. “Fly into El Paso?”

“Sure did. Pretty drive up here.”

“Get a load of them white sands? That’s as close to Christmas as it gets around here.”

“Never saw anything like it. Low crime rate around these parts?”

He snorted a laugh. “About as exciting as pickin’ a flea off a dog.”

I had figured as much, as long as this was taking. Finally, the chatty deputy scooted his chair back, rose and checked with the sheriff, who saw me right away.

Sheriff George Wilcox stood to shake hands behind his tidy desk in his doorless cubbyhole off the main office, which was taken up by the booking area and his two deputies at their desks. In a short-sleeve khaki shirt with a badge and Apache-pattern tie, Wilcox was a sturdy-looking, square-headed, jug-eared lawman of maybe fifty-five; his dark white-at-the-temples hair rose high over dark careless slashes of eyebrow, and his large dark eyes were somewhat magnified by wire-rim glasses; blunt-nosed, with a wide, thin mouth, Wilcox had a no-nonsense manner, gruff but not hostile.

“What’s the nature of your business here, Mr. Heller?” he asked; his baritone was as sandswept as his county’s terrain.

I had already shown him my Illinois private investigator’s license and my Cook County honorary deputy sheriff’s badge; neither seemed to impress him much.

Settling into a wooden chair no harder than the expression the sheriff was giving me, I said pleasantly, “I’m doing some background research for a nationally known journalist.”

“Who would that be?”

“My client requested I keep that confidential.”

“Why?”

“Frankly, he’s got a controversial reputation and he doesn’t want people to be put off.” That was about as candid as I could afford to be.

Wilcox rocked back in his swivel chair, digesting that. Then he said, “What’s the nature of the article? You’re too late for Rodeo Days.”

“Sounds like that would’ve made a fun story, but this one’s fun, too. You know, this flying saucer fad, in all the papers a couple years now—my client’s doing a kind of wrap-up, sort of a postwar hysteria angle. Looking into the better-known of the so-called ‘sightings.’”

Wilcox said nothing; his eyes had gone cold, their lids at half-mast.

I pressed on: “You know, Roswell has a special significance—it’s the only time the Air Force officially recognized the existence of saucers; they even put out a press release saying the wreckage of a disk had been recovered.”

Wilcox was studying me the way a lizard looks at a fly.

“Anyway,” I said, shifting in the chair, crossing my legs, “I’ve come to see you for two reasons. First of all, I didn’t want to go poking around your town without you knowing.”

“Appreciate that,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Second, I’m hoping I can interview you, for the article. I understand this rancher, Mac Brazel, brought in some samples of the oddball debris, and that you’re the one who called in the Air Force…. You mind if I take a few notes?”

I was taking my small spiral pad from my right hip pocket.

“Put that back, son,” he said, waggling a thick finger. He wasn’t all that much older than me, not enough to be calling me “son,” anyway; but he made me feel about fifteen, in the principal’s office, just the same.

“Sheriff, if you don’t want to be quoted,” I said, the notebook still in hand, “I could still use some background information …”

“Mr., uh—Helman, was it?”

“Heller.”

“I’ll let you take a few notes, and you can use my name, too. This won’t take long.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The Air Force said that thing was just an air balloon. That first press release … three hours later, they said it was a mistake.”

“Well, uh, Sheriff, mistake or not, there was quite a fuss—you had to field phone calls from all around the world, I understand.”

He nodded again. “I sat up all night, taking calls from Germany, London, France, Italy, all kinds of places, and probably every state of the Union. I told ’em what I’m telling you: talk to the Air Force.”

“That what you’re advising me?”

“No.” His tone was firm but not unkind. “My advice to you would be, move on to the next flying saucer story on your list.”

“Why is that?”

He nodded toward the notepad in my hands. “Now I am going to insist you put that thing away.”

“All right.”

“Don’t quote me. Don’t paraphrase me.”

“Certainly.”

Wilcox sat forward and placed both his hands on the desk; his tone shifted to a flatly ominous one that would have seemed ridiculous if it hadn’t been chilling. He said, simply, “Don’t look into this or you’re going to have real trouble.”

“Trouble from you, Sheriff?”

“Not from me.”

“Who from?”

“That’s all I have to say, on or off the record. Do yourself a favor, son—move on.”

“But, Sheriff, my understanding is that you saw some of this strange debris, even handled some of it. Was this stuff really as weird as has been reported? Thin metal that goes back to its original shape, if you wad it up? Unearthly hieroglyphics?”

Wilcox stood, slowly, smiling as benignly as a Buddha. “I appreciate your courtesy, Mr. Heller, stopping by to let me know about your inquiry.”

There’s a stage out of town at noon; be on it.

I sighed, stood, sticking my pad in my back pocket, nodding to him. “Thank you for your time, Sheriff.”

On the way out, the chatty deputy called to me, “Mr. Heller! Where are you staying, should we need to get in touch with you?”

I went over to his desk. “I’m at the El Capitan Hotel.”

“Over the drugstore downtown,” Deputy Reynolds said, nodding, writing it down. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

Then he extended his hand and I shook it, and felt a piece of paper there. His bright eyes narrowed and communicated something, and when I withdrew my hand, I tightened it over the note he’d passed me.

I didn’t look at it until I was out of the courthouse and onto the street: “Clover Cafe, two p.m.”

But right now it was barely ten, so I headed for the next stop on the list Major Marcel had provided Pearson; with the exception of the sheriff, everyone else was either expecting me or at least a chum of Marcel’s, and should be a friendly witness.

On the third floor of the Roswell equivalent of a skyscraper—a four-story brick building on Main Street—down on the left of a wood-and-pebbled-glass hallway, black stenciled letters on the door announced the
HAUT INSURANCE AGENCY
. I knocked, and a flat, midrange voice called, “Come on in!”

It was a single office, not very wide, and not very long, either, barely big enough for the ceiling fan that was lazily whirling, like a propeller warming up; no receptionist—no room for one. By an open window looking out on Main Street, at a work-piled rolltop desk, a boyishly handsome blue-eyed blond young man—maybe twenty-six, in shirtsleeves and a red-and-blue tie and blue slacks—was on the phone, talking life insurance with a client.

He waved me toward the hardwood chair alongside his desk and I sat, removing my straw fedora. The blond kid smiled at me, motioned that this call wouldn’t take long. It didn’t.

“Walter Haut,” he said affably, without standing, extending his hand, which I took and shook. “And you are?”

“Nathan Heller,” I said. “I believe Jesse Marcel warned you I’d be stopping by.”

“Oh, oh, yeah—sure! Glad to see ya. But, uh … you mind if I check your i.d. first?”

“Not at all.” I showed him the Illinois license and the honorary deputy’s badge.

His grin was affable and embarrassed. “You’ll have to excuse the less than lavish digs … I’m just getting in the insurance game … independent agent. I was in your field till about two months ago.”

“Investigation?”

He rolled his eyes. “Collection agency. I don’t know how you guys stand it.”

“My firm doesn’t do repo or skip tracing. Ugly work.”

“I agree.” He leaned an arm on his desk, leaned forward. “You know, I like people—I’m a member of the chamber of commerce—and the last way I want to make my living is doggin’ folks for a dollar. So … let’s make it ‘Nate’ and ‘Walt’ and skip the formalities. Any friend of Jesse’s is a friend of mine.”

“I don’t want to overstate my case, Walt. I’ve only spoken to Jesse once. But my feeling is he’s pretty bitter about taking the fall for Uncle Sam.”

Haut’s head bobbed up and down. “He got a bum shake, all right. Which is why I’m willing to talk … off the record, of course—confidential source, that kind of thing?”

“You got it. Mind if take notes?”

“Feel better if you would. Only thing … if my phone rings, I have to take it … one-man agency, you know how it is.”

“Actually, I do. I spent almost ten years that way, myself. When did you leave the service, Walt?”

“I left last August. I never intended to make a career of it. Were you in the service, Nate?”

I nodded. “Marines.”

“Overseas duty?”

“Guadalcanal.”

He blew an appreciative whistle. “Then you can understand how good civilian life looks to a guy who flew thirty-eight combat missions against the Japs.”

“Not a pilot, I take it.”

“Bombardier and navigator.”

Pen poised over the pad, I said, “Your postwar position out at the air base, I understand, was public relations officer?”

Haut leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, elbows winging. “Yeah, it was a pretty uneventful ride—except that Tuesday after the Fourth, in ’47. You gotta understand my job was kind of a funny mix—there was a lot we kept the lid on. Very tight security out at that base—keep in mind, you’re talking to the guy who dropped glass-gauged instruments smack dab into the Bikini explosion, and yet even I couldn’t get near aircraft with atomic bomb configuration.”

“Tightly run operation.”

He nodded vigorously. “Secure areas fenced off, MPs on twenty-four-hour guard—not only do you need a pass to get on that base, you need a further pass to even get near those aircraft.”

“Understandable.”

Haut sat forward again. “At the same time, for all of that, we wanted to foster good relations with the local community. Colonel Blanchard’s first duty out of West Point was same as mine, a public relations officer. So he had a real thing for building good feelings between the town and the base. Anything we were doing that was newsworthy, I was to let the two newspapers and two radio stations in on it. We let ’em come out and take pictures, whenever and whatever they wanted—long as they didn’t try to snap pictures of the B-29s.”

On the morning of July 8, 1947, Haut told me, he’d been called into the base commander’s office. Colonel Blanchard dictated a statement to his public information officer for immediate release to the local press acknowledging the 509th Bomb Group being “fortunate enough to gain possession” of a downed flying saucer (I had read the clipping in the file Pearson gave me).

“Around ten-thirty that morning,” Haut said, “I drove to town and made the rounds, dropping off the release at the radio stations, KGFL and KSWS, then over at the
Roswell Daily
Record
and
Roswell Morning Dispatch.
The
Record’s
an evening paper, and they’re the ones that had the headline story, that night—I just barely beat their deadline.” He shrugged. “Then I had lunch.”