Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (4 page)

“The suspect list, you mean?”

“Call it that if you like.” Forrestal reached behind him for his wallet and withdrew a check.

He held it out so I could see it: a three-thousand-dollar retainer for the A-1 Detective Agency.

“Nate, find out who wants me dead.”

I took the check. “Jim … this is awkward, but there’s something I have to raise. Doesn’t all this seem a little—familiar, to you?”

He blinked. “What do you mean?”

“That job I did for you, before the war—for your wife? She thought ‘they’ were out to get her, too, from the Commies to the household help.”

“That is an interesting coincidence,” he said, nodding somberly. “Of course, there’s a major distinction.”

I was putting the folded check into my wallet; mine was not to reason why, mine was but to keep my business afloat. “Which is?”

He shrugged. “My wife’s a lunatic.”

And he dipped his fingertips in the water glass and patted the moisture on the thin dry lips.

Back when the rest of the District of Columbia was swampland, Georgetown—in the city’s furthermost NW section—was a booming colonial seaport. Despite the lovely landscaped acreage of Georgetown University in its midst, the village had declined into a run-down near-slum by ’33, when FDR’s New Dealers and Harvard brain trust types had arrived on the scene, looking for lodging. These pillars of social conscience soon displaced much of the village’s Negro populace, and ramshackle former mansions that had housed ten or twelve colored families were renovated into suitable quarters for one wealthy white clan. Negroes were driven out of their timeworn wooden frame houses and crumbling stone cottages and weathered brick former slave quarters, which were quaintly though elaborately remodeled into dwellings befitting liberal white folk.

Now, in 1949, Georgetown was Greenwich Village gone to graduate school: within these reconditioned slums dwelled professors, artists, congressmen, and cabinet members.

But what these latter-day carpetbaggers hadn’t anticipated was the ancillary impact of this transformation: tourists. Picturesque postwar Georgetown’s once sleepy streets (some of which were still cobblestone) now bustled with tour buses and the sidewalks (some of which were still brick) teemed with Kodak-wielding explorers, seeking signs of their country’s bygone days.

In from the hinterlands on safari, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Buck (and all the little Bucks) trekked through a jungle of shaded streets, seeking the big game of formal mansions on tree-flung manicured lawns, and the smaller game of cozy cottages set flush against sidewalks. In the commercial section—mostly M Street and Wisconsin Avenue—Great White Hunters from Nebraska and Idaho could take a breather from the chase and duck into cozy cafes or charming little antique shops or bookstores in ancient houses with brand-new storefronts.

The hordes of rubberneckers were undoubtedly a pain in the ass for the locals, but manna from heaven for yours truly. Though late March was hardly the height of tourist season, there were plenty of out-of-towners gawking at Georgian mansions, refurbished stables and antebellum houses for a detective on stakeout to blend in with on this sunny Saturday. The thunderstorm that yesterday had pummeled the Chevy Chase Club’s golf course was now a few puddles, replaced by blossoming honeysuckle and magnolia announcing spring and welcoming visitors.

I tooled my dark green rental Ford down M Street, where I left the car in a parking garage near the Francis Scott Key Bridge; I walked away humming “The Star Spangled Banner,” jaywalking across to 34th Street and—pausing once to take in the dramatic view of the canal and the Potomac at my back—trudged up its steep hill.

Washington was a suit-and-tie town if you were a native, but I was a tourist in a pencil-stripe blue rayon short-sleeve shirt, darker blue garbardine slacks and a tan felt fedora. Falling in behind a honeymooning couple from Dubuque (eavesdropping is second nature to the paid snoop), I turned left onto Prospect Street; the lovebirds and I crossed to the right-hand side of the street. The bride was a curvy little brunette, by the way; the groom … I don’t remember.

Their destination—and that of any number of other Washington wayfarers—was a weathered gray-painted brick colonial house with white trim and shutters and authentic period decor. Tours were available and a gift and coffee shop was inside, a stone bench outside. When I wasn’t on foot, scouting the neighborhood, the coffee shop and the bench were my home for the surveillance.

The coffee shop in particular was perfect, with its generous window view of the big house cater-cornered from here. The plump fiftyish colonial-costumed gal who managed the coffee shop (and who cheerily negotiated me up from a sawbuck to a double sawbuck for the privilege of hanging around most of the day) informed me that 3508 Prospect Street was known as Morris House, built in the 1700s and once owned by a naval commander of that name.

Another naval commander—the former Secretary of the Navy, in fact, who was the current Secretary of Defense—lived there now. Forrestal and his wife had only been in that Woodland Drive house near Rock Creek Park a year or so before moving into this impressive, dignified near mansion with its trim brick walls and exquisite Georgian detailing. The front was well-proportioned, sitting above the sidewalk on a low, stone basement story, and the west wing had been turned into a garage; but its most distinctive feature was an octagonal tower that had no doubt once allowed the naval commander named Morris to keep watch on his fleet.

In back of the house were well-tended terraces that fell toward the Potomac, a view that could be enjoyed from New Orleans-style balconies whose iron grilles and leaf-and-grape design were sheer French Quarter. Beyond the terraces, hugging the waterfront, were the ramshackle shacks of some of Georgetown’s remaining colored residents; I doubted the tour buses pointed these out or that many Brownie snapshots got taken.

Of course I couldn’t see the rear view of the Forrestal house from my window seat in that coffee shop, or the bench out front, either. Periodically I walked the area, as the point of this exercise was not to maintain surveillance on Forrestal but to ascertain whether he was the subject of surveillance. This meant a careful, surreptitious assessment of any peddlers, vagrants, street cleaners, laborers or other invisible members of the landscape; plus checking out second-floor or higher windows, and parked cars.

Throughout a long Saturday morning, neither my periodic reconnaissance of the neighborhood nor my across-the-street observation turned anyone or anything up. Despite my suspicion that Forrestal’s fears were a stress-induced unconscious imitation of the symptoms of his wife’s earlier mental breakdown, I operated from the assumption that he really was being watched. I took him seriously. Or anyway, I took his three-grand retainer seriously.

This was an atypical day for Forrestal. Any other Saturday, he would have been at his Pentagon office; he was a fourteen-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week workhorse and what little leisure time he had was spent on the golf course at Chevy Chase or Burning Tree, or in the company of women other than his wife. It seemed to me if somebody was trying to kill him, the husbands of the married women he slept with were more likely candidates than Zionists or the CIA.

Today, however, my client was home. There was no work to do at the office because tomorrow was his last day as Secretary of Defense. His wife wasn’t home, either—she was at their farm in Duchess County, New York; this was not atypical, as they’d been living more or less separate lives for some time now. But Forrestal indicated he and Jo would be “meeting up” at the Island Club resort in Hobe Sound, Florida, later in the week, for a “post-retirement wind-down.”

“You’ll come to Florida with me,” Forrestal had told me yesterday in the Chevy Chase parking lot when the rain had let up, “as added security. Hobe Sound’s a perfect place for them to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Kill me!”

“Oh. Right.”

Which gave me today and tomorrow to determine if my client was being watched.

Just after one o’clock, Forrestal came out the front door, in golfing attire, and was picked up in a black Lincoln with a white chauffeur—Forrestal was chauffeured everywhere by government limo—and, per plan, I walked back to M Street, got my car, caught up with the Lincoln and hung a loose tail on it.

The driver headed out Wisconsin Avenue, toward Bethesda in nearby Maryland, where Forrestal was to meet a friend from New York—investment banker Ferdinand Eberstadt—at Burning Tree, a private, men’s-only country club. This excursion would allow Forrestal to relax a little (if that grim brand of golf of his could be considered relaxing) and give me the chance to see if anybody else was tailing him.

Nobody was. After Forrestal got dropped off at the two-story stone clubhouse, I followed his chauffeur to a movie theater in nearby Rockville where the chauffeur (and I, though he didn’t know he had company) caught a matinee of
Undercover Man,
Hollywood’s version of how the feds sent Capone away. Glenn Ford didn’t remind me much of either Elmer Irey or Frank Wilson, the real IRS agents on that case, and my pal Eliot Ness and his squad of Treasury agents were nowhere to be seen. Not that it mattered, as I was paying more attention to the chauffeur than the silver screen, waiting to see if anybody made contact with him.

Nobody did. So it was back to Georgetown, with no one following Forrestal’s limo but me, and back to the bench and the coffee shop and periodic bouts of foot surveillance. The coffee shop was my salvation because it provided cold sandwiches, hot coffee and a men’s room. But the place closed at eight p.m., just after dark, when the streets were beginning to thin of tourists, so after a brief stint on the bench, I went back to the parking garage for the car and parked on 35th Street, where I had a reasonably good view of Morris House.

I was on the same side of the street as sprawling Georgetown University Hospital, which took up the entire block between Prospect and N Street. I sat in front, behind the wheel, seat reclined as far as possible, to where I could see just over the dashboard, fedora tipped forward and almost covering my eyes, arms folded casually, as if I’d pulled over for a rest. The key to this is sitting very still—passersby rarely notice you, and if they do, think nothing of the sight of a guy grabbing a quick nap. Plus, the proximity of the hospital made my presence commonplace.

With the tourists gone, and the traffic eased, the neighborhood grew quiet, its carriage-house-style gaslamps casting a golden patina over the elegantly historic homes with their deep-red brick walls, black wrought-iron trim, burnished brass doorknockers. It was not difficult to imagine the likes of John Adams or Aaron Burr walking these streets, or to summon the ghostly clip-clop of hoofbeats, or the sound of children singing “Yankee Doodle” when it was still a new tune.

Or maybe I’d just been on stakeout too long.

It had been a long day and I was about to hang it up when an attractive young mulatto woman, in her mid-twenties, exited a side door of Morris House, near the garage. She had a nervous manner: nothing extreme, just occasional furtive glances as if afraid somebody was watching her.

Which of course somebody was.

I recognized her, because I’d questioned Forrestal about his small household staff; this would be Della Brown, the maid. The others were a colored cook, Leon Parker, a Filipino houseboy (Remy something), and a white butler, Stanley Campbell, all live-in help. The Brown woman, who had this evening off, looked prepared to step out on the town, a milk-chocolate Veronica Lake in her clingy pink-and-black dress with pointed collars and keyhole neckline and bright nosegay at her waist; high heels and black patent leather clutch purse, too.

So why was she looking around like a kid sneaking down a rainspout?

A dish like this, going out on Saturday night, surely had a date; but nobody was picking her up. Maybe that was frowned on in this white neighborhood, a colored boy picking up a colored gal after work. Whatever the reason, she was on foot, crossing Prospect Street at the moment, and walking directly toward where I was parked.

I remained motionless as the Lincoln Monument, in my feigned nap, and she walked on by, pretty legs flashing under the pink-and-black dress. In my rearview mirror, I could see her rear view and it was like watching kittens wrestle in a burlap bag. If she was trying not to attract attention, she needed to find a whole new way of walking.

At the end of the block, she cut right, onto N Street, and when she’d disappeared around that corner, I followed; the night was cool and I’d thrown on a tan sportcoat. With so little traffic on the street and no other pedestrians, I could have been spotted by Helen Keller, so I had to play tiptoe anarchist and keep to the bushes and duck behind trees, staying a good half block behind her, on the opposite side of N Street as she made her way down, her high heels clicking like castanets. Fortunately, there were plenty of trees on this well-shaded street with its handsome Federal-style townhouses, but it was an endless block and made for nerve-racking work, particularly since she was glancing behind her now and then.

Finally she turned onto Wisconsin Avenue, leaving the residential neighborhood for the heart of Georgetown’s commercial district, where cafes, restaurants and bars were courting the remaining tourist trade. Now I had pedestrians to blend in with, storefront windows to catch her reflection in and otherwise conduct a normal tail; and before long she had headed into Martin’s Bar, which surprised me some.

I knew, from previous jobs I’d worked in this town, that Martin’s was Georgetown’s favorite political watering hole—more New Deal policy had been made over beers in this unpretentious joint than at cabinet meetings. What was Forrestal’s maid doing, dropping by the place where Tommy the Cork and Harry Hopkins changed the world while Georgetown students got boisterously blotto around them?

In Chicago, New York and Hollywood, barroom walls are festooned with photos of movie stars, stage actors and recording artists. The dark-paneled walls of Martin’s, like those of any respectable D.C. gin mill, were adorned with framed presidents, generals and cabinet officers.

The place was not hopping—this wasn’t a Saturday-night kind of bar, even lacking a jukebox—and for a moment I thought Miss Brown had made me, and ducked in here to slip a quick exit through the alley door. But then I spotted her, sitting in the farthest back booth, opposite a young guy in a brown suit, yellow tie and white skin.

Georgetown was looser than the rest of Washington about coloreds and whites mixing; but this was fairly bold. The emptiness of the bar was in their favor—in other booths, a few couples were having a drink after dinner or before a show, the bar stools empty, except for the one I perched myself on.

Was this the reason for Miss Brown’s furtive manner? A date with a white guy, a well-dressed, respectable-looking white guy at that….

I watched them in the mirror behind the bar. The red-vested bartender, a pudgy thirtyish guy with thinning brown hair and a name tag that said Tom, came over to take my order.