Dry Bones (23 page)

The buzzer on the intercom sounds. The allotted ten minutes is at an end. Fintan Dunne escorts his visitor to the door.

As the visitor takes his leave, he stops to get a last and closer look at the framed picture of Fintan Dunne and General Donovan. They are both in uniform. The London landmark, Big Ben, looms in the background. Beneath, in a clear, bold hand, is written:
To Fintan Dunne, My highest regards to a soldier’s soldier. Bill Donovan, London, May 1944.

G
RAYBAR
B
UILDING
, M
ANHATTAN

Instead of storming into Ken Moss’s office, Dunne went straight to his own. Miss Teresa Dolores O’Keefe greeted him with her customary smile—delicate, understated—lifted the eyeglasses roped around her neck, and rested them on the bridge of her nose. Like all ISC executive assistants, she wasn’t to be conflated with standard secretaries found at other firms or the denizens of the typing pool parked at desks in the rear of the office.

Miss O’Keefe was a graduate of the College of St. Elizabeth, English major, German minor. Smart and alluring in knees-together, virginal, parochial-school fashion, she was the daughter of a Jersey City cop who was gunned down in a waterfront shoot-out. Her mother was left with five kids and went back to work as a bookkeeper in the Garment District. Miss O’Keefe had four brothers: one older, KIA in Korea; three younger, fireman, cop, student at Manhattan College. It could be, Dunne suspected, that her air of convent-girl innocence was acquired rather than innate.

If she followed the company script, she’d find a husband within ISC in the next year or two, becoming a suitable helpmate as her spouse rose up the ladder, or she’d be promoted to researcher or junior section specialist, the highest station any female employee could reach, there to earn a decent living as she spun her way to spinsterhood or to be whisked away, Prince Charming come at last.

Or maybe she’d write her own script. She’d never mentioned she was working on a novel. But one day, while she was at lunch, he sneaked a peek in her bottom drawer. It held half a dozen of the same marbled-covered composition books, each page filled with her work-in-progress,
Springtime of Our Love: A Novel of World War II
, a romance set in occupied France. Boy resistance fighter falls in love with girl resistance fighter.

They struggle against the siren song of lust as well as the serial depredations of the Germans:
The passion they shared was fiery, unquenchable. Yet, they vowed, until the conquest of their motherland, their sweet Marianne, was undone, it must go unconsummated.
Wasn’t to his taste, but without letting on he knew what she was up to, he wished her success, best-seller list, screenplay, the works.

She brought him a mug of coffee, laid a file of correspondence on his desk. “Your Monday morning staff meeting is in fifteen minutes. Mr. Billings is scheduled to make a presentation. Partners as well as senior section specialists are expected to attend.”

He thanked her and sipped the coffee. He sat at his desk, opened the monogrammed leather attaché case Roberta had bought him at Crouch & Fitzgerald, and took out the lone contents: June issue of
Modern Detection
. He read the article for a third time. It was Ken Moss’s handiwork. It had to be. There was no doubt about it.

Dressing down Moss in a reverberant roar sufficient to rattle the thin walls and glass partitions of the newly refurbished ISC executive floor and bring people to their office doors could offer short-term satisfaction. Long term, Dunne realized, along with making Moss into the apparent victim of an ill-advised tirade, he’d be deemed lacking in the cool-headed, logical, problem-solving approach that marked an ISC executive.

Dunne’s title of “partner” seemed to elevate him above the rules and expectations governing employees of lesser status. But it
wasn’t bestowed out of organizational considerations. Thanks to the influence of Louis Pohl—“Pully,” as all his friends called him—a buddy from OSS days and a bigwig within the company, the management at the time thought it would appeal to existing and prospective clients, affording the Private Investigation and Security Department the feel of detective agency and law firm wrapped in a well-managed corporation.

The contract he’d signed required his presence in New York headquarters only six months of the year—May 1 through October 31—in order to “provide counsel and support to ISC Private Investigation and Security” as well as assist in “identifying, soliciting and signing new business.” It also stipulated that the company provide a sublet “within walking distance” of the office.

In practice, since becoming a publicly traded company, ISC didn’t have partners. Whether “associates” or “specialists”—the new designations of choice—all were salaried employees. Dunne’s contract would either be renewed (or not) at the end of the year.

Louis Pohl had thrown himself out a window of the adjacent Commodore Hotel the previous February. Though Pully didn’t leave a note, it seemed certain he’d suffered a nervous breakdown. He’d called down to the front desk, gibbering about the walls in his room turning into blood and the chairs talking to him. By the time the house detective reached his room to see what was going on, Pully was splattered on the sidewalk below.

Dunne and Roberta were vacationing in Havana when it happened. There was no funeral. He sent a note of condolence to Pully’s mother in Forest Hills, and she wrote back an anguished, painful-to-read response that he kept in his desk drawer. She had her son’s ashes in an urn on her mantel. She couldn’t understand why he’d taken his own life. He’d always been “serious and individualistic,” never seemed suicidal. She wished she’d known of his intent. She was sure she could have talked him out of it.

“To lose a child is to have your heart forever broken,” she
wrote. “You don’t recover. You go on. But to lose an only child and in such a manner—oh, Mr. Dunne, you can’t imagine.”

She was wrong. Though he could never fully comprehend, he could imagine. Soon after he returned from Europe, he’d visited Peter Bunde’s parents in Buffalo, sat with them in their living room for a long winter’s afternoon. Grief was lined deep in their faces like the ruts water carves into rock.

On the practical side, Dunne knew that with Pully’s demise he no longer had a “rabbi” to watch over him in the inner ranks of management. A new generation of button-down business school graduates in their late twenties and early thirties—one or two who’d served during the Korean conflict but never made it overseas—was surging into leadership positions and pushing to hire consultants to help “identify and implement long-overdue efficiencies” and “reengineer the company’s basic business model.”

They had already succeeded in a number of cosmetic changes, scrapping “departments” in favor of “sections,” which, they maintained, rid ISC of the musty odor of “old-fashioned bureaucracy.” (The Private Investigation and Security Section was known in-house by the tongue-in-cheek acronym PISS.) They made no secret they thought “partner” detracted from the image projected by the new corporate motto,
ISC: Where Management Is a Science
—coined by Ken Moss, Junior Associate, the Communications and Public Relations Section (CAPS)—which they applauded.

The part-time arrangement proved more than amenable to Dunne and Roberta. They found they enjoyed the city more than when they’d been full-time residents, going to the theater and trying out new restaurants. Though the city could be a sweatbox in summer—unlike the heat in Florida, a shroud that rarely lifted—it came and went in waves. The apartment and office were air-conditioned. Each July, Roberta got away with her girlfriends (all married to well-to-do husbands) on a month-long vacation, which this year had turned into a two-month cruise to the Orient.

In years past, Roberta and he had taken long weekends on Block Island or Shelter Island, staying at one of the inns. But with her away, Dunne was content to stay in the city and wander around Greenwich Village, where new-style “beatniks” had replaced old-time bohemians, or Little Italy, where you could sit outdoors and linger over a glass of wine for hours at a time.

Once he walked toward Dry Dock Street, thinking he’d visit where he’d lived as a kid. Quickly reminded that everything between Avenue C and the East River Drive had been torn down—or was being torn down—and rebuilt, he turned around and didn’t bother.

Now and then, he rode the subway up to the Bronx Zoo. He liked to smoke and watch the animals sleep, especially the polar bears. Ferocious as they were reputed to be, their placidity struck him as profound. He felt it wasn’t merely a seasonal torpor or depressive resignation to captivity. They periodically roused themselves for a rowdy splash in the icy-looking pool.

Roberta accompanied him one visit. He shared his observation with her.

“You’re indulging in anthropomorphic projection,” she said. “The poor animal is bored out of its mind.”

Maybe. But they didn’t have to hunt their next meal; didn’t worry about retirement or medical care; never thought about how their lives would end, regrets they’d carry to the grave, opportunities that had escaped their grasp, about usefulness or relevance. He thought he heard something deeper than resignation or stupor in the sighs they emitted as they slumbered. He was sure he’d never met a human being capable of such contentment.

In the short period of full retirement several years back, Dunne faced up to the fact that although he was financially set after the sale of his agency to ISC, he wasn’t ready to let go. The arrangement with ISC was a happy one. At least it had been. He was aware of the change that had taken place since he’d returned
the month before. At first he imagined he was reading into things. No longer. The memo from Ken Moss announcing ISC’s new motto proclaimed that “we are moving to take hold of the future and position ourselves on new growth trajectories.” He wondered if and when those trajectories would rocket him out the door—lately, more when than if.

In hindsight, he recognized that ISC’s interest in PISS had been waning for some time. Nobody had been fired (at least not at the upper levels). But after Louis Pohl’s suicide and Jeff Wine’s retirement, the L.A. office closed and the slots left by other retirees went unfilled. The section was profitable. Whether in its present configuration it exhibited the “dynamic growth characteristics” the annual report touted ISC as demanding from all its sections remained to be seen.

The new emphasis in Private Investigation and Security, it was explained, must be on selling, installing, and servicing electronic security and surveillance systems, a business requiring far fewer employees and in which profit margins were far higher. It also avoided the personal volatility and unpleasantness endemic to private investigations such as occurred the previous year when Pepsi-Cola chairman and CEO Alfred Steele indicated the company had a matter of “utmost delicacy” that needed handling.

Mrs. Steele, formerly Academy Award–winning actress Joan Crawford, had traded in her fast-fading stardom to become his wife and help burnish the image and boost sales of the perennial also-ran to Coca-Cola. Two days before, she’d received a blackmail threat. Postmarked L.A., it claimed to have a copy of a stag film she’d made in the days when she was Lucille LeSueur, a sexy, intensely ambitious Midwesterner clawing her way from chorus line to front and center on the silver screen.

Steele said his wife denied the authenticity of the film yet feared even a coincidental resemblance to one of the performers could be used to embarrass her. Dunne advised Steele his best
course was to go to the police because even if he paid what was demanded and got the film, there’d be no way to ensure the blackmailer wouldn’t have more copies and keep coming back. Steele listened and said he’d discuss it with his wife.

The next day, Dunne was dictating a letter to his Miss O’Keefe when Joan Crawford, tightly girdled, elegantly decked in pearls, white turban, and black dress, arrived unannounced in his office. She ordered Miss O’Keefe out and closed the door.

She perched on the edge of his desk. He lit her cigarette for her. Sleek and polished as chrome, eyebrows arched and emphatic, she sucked it so hard she squinted.

He’d met her at the Pepsi Christmas party at the Waldorf Astoria. She sat next to him, crossed her legs, shapely ankle brushed his thigh, perhaps accidentally. They exchanged a few pleasantries. Beneath her cosmetic facade and quiet elegance, mink stole, mink hat, mink cuffs, was a wartime urgency, physical, immediate, demanding.

He left the party right after and hadn’t seen her since. Until now.

She leaned back and exhaled. “My husband conveyed your advice. You think we should go to the police?”

“From my experience, that’s the only way to—”

“That’s bullshit, Dunne.” Her nostrils flared, voice rose. “Do you think my husband retains mugs like you to sit on your keisters and tell him to fuck off the first time he gives you a real job to do?”

He endured her angry monologue on “the low-life, backstabbing scum” in Hollywood and “the lazy, greedy cocksuckers” who worked for her husband in New York, interrupting at one point to warn that if she didn’t want the whole office to know her business, she should lower her voice.

She ignored him, pacing back and forth. If she was putting on an act, playing a fury-fueled Amazon determined to do what had to be done until she got what she wanted, it was an award-winning
performance. She left as abruptly as she’d arrived. Her parting words: “I want that film, Dunne. I don’t give a rat’s ass how you get it.”

No need to ask whether she was in the film or merely afraid of a “coincidental resemblance.” He had his answer. He made the eight-and-a-half-hour flight to L.A. With Jeff Wine’s help, he identified the blackmailer as a broken-down, boozed-up ex-screenwriter living in a dilapidated bungalow in Santa Monica. The rat’s ass turned out to be two outstanding warrants against him, one for bigamy, another for embezzlement, which Wine flushed out of the local court files.