Better Dead (31 page)

“Place was packed this afternoon,” the only waitress reported, delivering beers to me and my guest. She was short and blond and cute in a white blouse and black skirt.

“Oh?” I said, summoning interest.

She nodded. “The Packers-Lions game. DuMont Network had it … and
we
had the only TV.”

It was on right now, over the bar, a 17-inch screen playing
You Bet Your Life.

“Green Bay led at the half,” Norman Cournoyer said, “but the Lions took it.” His voice was a second tenor with some rasp.

“I'll run a tab,” she said, leaving two pilsners.

“That's why DuMont is the also-ran network,” I said. “Who wants to watch football on the head of a pin?”

“Well,” Cournoyer said with a shrug, “you may be right, Mr. Heller—but every male in-law of mine was crowded around my TV like it was a damn campfire.”

Tall, slender but solidly built, with close-cropped black hair and heavy black eyebrows, Frank Olson's best friend at Camp Detrick somehow conveyed both an intellectual air and a man's man's bearing. He was Superman in Clark Kent mode: sharp dark eyes behind plastic-rimmed glasses, strong nose, cleft chin, olive complexion smudged with McCarthy-esque five o'clock shadow. He wore a long-sleeve yellow sportshirt with brown trim on the pockets and collar and cuffs, top button buttoned.

“Funny to be in a bar with so little smoke,” he said, glancing at the minuscule crowd. “Are you a smoker, Mr. Heller?”

“No. Left that behind in the Pacific.”

“I stopped when I started working in an area where you learned what you took into your lungs can kill you.”

That was already a little more frank than I'd expected him to be.

His face maintained a deceptively bland expression. “Alice says she hasn't heard from Frank since Vin Ruwet dragged him off to D.C. to get his head shrunk.”

“That's right.”

A sip of beer. “She also says you're an old friend of Frank's who happens to be a private investigator, and you've offered to try to find him.”

“Yeah. I'm starting with you. Have
you
heard from him, Mr. Cournoyer?”

He shook his head. “But if Frank told Alice he'd be home for Thanksgiving, and he didn't show? Then he's in it very damn deep, Mr. Heller. Very damn deep.”

Now I had a sip. “Sounds like you know what you're talking about, Mr. Cournoyer.”

He gave me the kind of smile you give a pal who just told a corny joke. “Well, let's start with this—you're a private investigator all right, but you're no old friend of Frank's. I've known him since the war and I think he'd have mentioned knowing someone as famous as you.”

“I'm not so famous.”

Thick black eyebrows lifted above the clear-rimmed glasses. “Famous enough. But let's skip the dance. You can't play the jukebox while the TV's on anyway, right? You're who McCarthy sent to talk to Frank.”

I looked at him over the pilsner. “He told you that?”

“He tells me damn near everything. I'm his sounding board, and he's mine. Frank could tell you, for instance, that I'm about to put my resignation in as an army officer, and that I've arranged to stick around as head of food service at Transylvania. Which is what we call Camp Detrick.”

I squinted at him, as if it might bring him into focus.

“You're resigning,” I said, “because…?”

A hand flip. “Same reasons why Frank tried to resign. He just didn't
handle
it very well. He's got a lot of good qualities, Frank, but subtlety ain't one of 'em. See, I knew enough to stay on at Detrick, in a harmless capacity … although considering the kind of biowarfare research I've done, you wouldn't think they'd want me handling their food, would you, Mr. Heller. Or do you like the tangy taste of anthrax?”

“When you're a man who knows too much,” I said, “it makes sense to stay on the team. Even as water boy.”

“Bingo.”

“What have they done with Frank, Mr. Cournoyer?”

He made a toasting gesture with his glass. “We'll make it ‘Norm' and ‘Nate,' what say?”

“I say, Norm, isn't a guy who swapped germ warfare for serving up Salisbury steak taking a big risk talking to me?”

“I'm off their radar,” he said, with a shrug, his expression blank. “I'm a team player, like you said. Frank never has been. He's always bucking authority, never shy about speaking his mind. That's why he resigned from the Army and signed back on as a civilian employee, in the SOD.”

I grunted a laugh. “The fun-and-games biochemical lab. Not as safe as the kitchen, huh, Norm?”

His face had a softness, but the eyes behind the lenses were hard. “Not as safe as the kitchen. Of course you know what they say about if you can't stand the heat.… You already talked to Frank, right?”

“Did he tell you that?”

He shook his head. “Just that he was going to talk to somebody McCarthy sent. I'm assuming that's you.”

“Sometimes it's safe to assume.”

“Why don't I fill in some background, Nate, and if it's one you already heard, stop me.” A frown fought through his defenses. “Less I have to talk about this shit, the better I like it.”

“Please.”

A sip of beer. Another. “Did Frank tell you about his European trips?”

“He touched on them.”

Black eyebrows climbed. “Including that he witnessed radical information retrieval?”

“I don't know what that is.”

His voice was casually informative, as if he were sharing a barbecue recipe. “Well, Nate, it's an interrogation method that involves drugs, torture, and electroshock, among other goodies. Guinea pigs were Soviet prisoners, former Nazis, security leaks. These methods frequently lead to death.”

“Frank mentioned something like that.”

“… Did he mention Korea?”

“No.”

The dark eyes flared a millisecond, and his voice, already not loud, became a near whisper. “Hell, man, that's the key. Frank knows that biological weapons have been used over there. By
our
side. And he's not happy about that. He says some of these radical interrogation techniques, utilizing his work, have been used on Americans.”

Had Alice Olson sent me to a kook?

I asked, “Why in hell would Americans be subjected to that?”

His voice, no longer a whisper but still on the soft side, turned as bland as his expression. “For one, debriefings of military and civilian personnel, who witnessed or participated in biological warfare in Korea. This involves brainwashing, memory wipes, all kinds of extreme experimental techniques. Frank has been worked up about all of this for months. It's been building.”

“How so?”

“Well, he asked me if I knew the name of a good journalist, for one.”

Maybe I should have pulled Pearson in on this. Maybe I still should.

He smiled faintly. “I didn't have a reporter for him, but I did suggest McCarthy. Ol' Joe's a ham-handed son of a bitch, but he'd get the story out. So that's what Frank did.” What there was of a smile faded. “And look what it got him.”

“
What
did it get him, Norm?”

“I don't know what it's getting him right at this moment, Nate. I have an idea, and I don't mind sharing it with you. But first you have to hear about what went on at Deep Creek Lodge.”

I frowned. “The work retreat he went on?”

Cournoyer held up two hands, palms out, as if in surrender. “Now, I wasn't there, Nate. I
was
at
other
retreats at Deep Creek, mind you—beautiful place, isolated, all wooded, water on three sides, Appalachians looming. Scattering of cabins and a central stone lodge, fireplace, moose heads, the works.”

“Got it.”

Another hand flip. “So, anyway, this is secondhand, but it's secondhand from Frank. All right?”

“All right.”

The waitress brought us fresh beers. When she'd trotted off, Cournoyer pushed his pilsner to one side and folded his hands. He might have been Daddy saying grace.

“Frank didn't say much about what went on the first few days,” he said. “There were ten scientists present, some from SOD and others from a CIA team. Both groups were working, separately, on different aspects of the same germ weaponry project, and this was a chance to compare notes, brainstorm—a regular skull session. They'd done the same thing the year before. Just a friendly, productive get-together.”

If you consider germ warfare productive,
I thought.

Cournoyer was saying, “Two top CIA scientists on the project were running the retreat—Gottlieb and Lashbrook. Gottlieb's a real brain but an oddball, high up in the Agency. He stutters and has a club foot but don't underestimate him. Only in his mid-thirties, but somebody to reckon with.”

“First name?”

“Sidney. And Lashbrook's is Robert; he's Gottlieb's deputy. Gottlieb is a big believer in this LSD-25 stuff—considers it a real tongue loosener, a kind of truth serum, potentially a very powerful tool. He's run all sorts of tests on unsuspecting subjects, last year or so. You need to know that going in.”

“Okay.”

He gestured with an open hand, painting the picture. “For two days, they have group meetings in front of the roaring fire, then split off for smaller specialized meetings—typical retreat stuff. They relax and unwind in the evening. After dinner on Thursday night, everybody enjoys a glass of Cointreau—you know, the triple sec?”

I nodded.

“Served up by Gottlieb and Lashbrook from a couple of bottles. A nice gesture, huh? Twenty minutes later, Gottlieb gathers everybody by the fire and tells them they've just consumed a healthy dose of LSD-25.”

“Jesus.”

Cournoyer shook his head, grinning. “No, you don't understand, Nate. These scientists are fine with experiments like this. They dose everybody else, why not themselves?”

“Okay…”

“In fact, Frank says they laughed their asses off—joke's on
us
for a change. For a while they're loud and boisterous, then all sorts of philosophical discussions get going. But after a while Frank starts feeling paranoid, and when in the wee hours everybody goes off to bed, he can't sleep. Gottlieb and Lashbrook act concerned and walk him outside the main lodge to a cabin, so as not to disturb anybody. And here's the thing—Frank told me he isn't even sure what he said to those two. He remembered being talkative, and thought maybe he'd said too much. About his guilt, about his misgivings, over what he'd been doing. What they'd
all
been doing.”

“He wasn't
sure
he'd spilled?”

“No. It was fuzzy. But he
suspected
he'd been given a dose of his own medicine—that some of the interrogation techniques he'd helped develop had been turned back on him. And he was afraid he'd made an awful mistake.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“I only have two names for you,” he said. “Two people in New York who may know where Frank is. If you still want them.”

Something had crept through the bland mask—what was it?

“Please,” I said.

Fear.

“Nate. Mr. Heller. Do you know what you might be getting yourself into?”

“I think so.”

“I'm not sure you do. For example, imagine you were me. You might be a CIA asset right now, planning to pat me on the back as you leave, and pinprick me with a poison that Frank or some other genius concocted and I won't see Christmas. I won't see fucking Friday. Do you understand?”

“I'm starting to,” I said.

 

CHAPTER

18

Fog got turned into an ivory mist by a two-thirds moon as I followed the winding dirt road and pulled into the driveway of the Olson house, where I had left Bettie. The ranch-style was set back a good distance, surrounded by tall trees whose remaining leaves shivered, ghostly gnarled limbs ticking the rooftop. Lights glowed within the house but the place seemed nonetheless lost in shadow.

Alice met me at the door with a confused, even tortured expression, my lovely black-haired companion standing just behind her with eyes as big as they were blue. The two women led me into the living room, the kids already in bed.

“Something odd has happened,” Alice said.

No! Not something odd?

“Tell me,” I said.

We sat on the couch with me between them, branches scratching at the windows.

“Vin stopped by, not long after you left,” Alice said, her hands folded in her lap as she sat forward. “Vin Ruwet, Frank's boss?”

I nodded. “What did he have to say?”

“He apologized for not getting here sooner. He said Frank had several sessions starting Tuesday evening with a Dr. Abramson.”

Dr. Harold Abramson—one of the two names Norman Cournoyer had given me just minutes before.

“Go on,” I said.

“Vin said Wednesday night they'd had dinner together and gone to a Broadway show. This morning Frank seemed better and after breakfast they checked out of the Statler Hotel, and went to LaGuardia for a morning flight to D.C., for a session with some other doctor. After that, Vin was driving Frank here when Frank made him pull over. Told Vin he wanted to go back to see Dr. Abramson, that he needed more help. That he was afraid … afraid of doing me and the children bodily harm.”

That phony phrase again—who says “bodily harm” outside of a police report?

“So what's happening now?”

“Frank's getting more help. Vin says.”

“Was Vin specific about what kind of help?”

She nodded. “They took a plane from D.C. back to New York, to go to Dr. Abramson's home on Long Island—the doctor ‘generously' interrupting his family Thanksgiving. I asked where Frank is staying tonight, but Vin says he doesn't know—somewhere on Long Island, he supposes. Supposes! If this is all so … so
benign
 … why hasn't Frank called me? Where is my
husband's
voice in all this?”