Better Dead (35 page)

“No. He was getting ready for bed. Maybe first thing tomorrow?”

“Sure. Did you mention me to him?”

“No, but you were working for him, so he shouldn't be surprised seeing you.”

“Okay, Alice. But stay in touch. If anything happens at all, I want to know about it. No matter the hour. You have the number here at the hotel. Let me give you Bettie's—that's where I may be later.”

I did that.

“Nate,” she said warmly, “I think you really helped.”

“I tried to apply just the right amount of pressure,” I said. “But it's tricky.”

We said our goodbyes, and I hung up, but this seemed too easy. Too pat. This wouldn't be over until I'd been face-to-face with Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, even if it took a fucking hoedown to do it.

*   *   *

The Village Barn was next door to El Chico (small world), at 52 West Eighth Street. Going strong since 1930, the place held no appeal for most Village dwellers and took aim at tourists, right down to a bus prowling Times Square to haul them back for “Three Shows Nightly” and supper for a buck. The music was mostly country and folk, usually with one mainstream act on the bill, but hillbilly comedy acts were the staple—Judy Canova, whose hayseed shtick made her a movie star, got discovered here by that well-known rustic, Rudy Vallee.

Bettie and I descended a steep set of stairs into a huge, high-ceilinged club that consumed the basement and first floor of the building, turning the space into the barn that its name threatened. The rough-wood walls bore homespun sayings (“Lord willin' and the creek don't rise!”) as well as wagon wheels, saddles, rakes, scythes, and harnesses, with horse collars and milk cans hanging off the rafters.

A sea of tables for four with linen tablecloths to dress the place up surrounded the good-size dance floor, with a bandstand designed to suggest a hayloft. Bettie and I were guided by a cowgirl to a ringside table. A bar was off to the right, the bartenders looking like extras in a Roy Rogers picture.

Bettie had changed into a red dress trimmed white, the upper half hugging her, the lower a full skirt, though without petticoats. The boots she had on were black leather with heels that I had a hunch were not designed for square dancing. I remained in my nine-millimeter-friendly Richard Bennett charcoal number, also not designed for square dancing.

Right now Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys were playing “Deep Water,” a nice slow number that we danced to while my eyes searched the packed house for Sidney Gottlieb.

I had no photo to go on, but the description given me by Norman Cournoyer was distinctive enough: tall, wiry, mid-thirties, prematurely white-haired, handsome (“kind of a Jewish Gregory Peck,” Cournoyer had said). A major tell would be his slight but noticeable limp of the right foot, where he wore a built-up shoe due to his club foot.

We danced some more to Wills, and then got back to our table for some shoofly pie and coffee, and I was about to throw in the towel when Wills announced his band would now have “the pleasure of playing for any of you true-blue square dancers out there.” He turned the microphone over to one “Piute Pete,” self-proclaimed “Greatest Hog-Caller East of the Rockies.” Despite his straw hat and overalls, Pete looked more like somebody working the west side of a deli counter.

Couples and some singles, too, rushed the dance floor. Bettie tried to tug me along, but I said no, and she ran out there with little chance of not finding someone eager to partner up with her. Half a dozen groups of the dancers did the hog-caller's bidding (
“Choose your partners!”
) as I sat suffering through hokey fiddle playing and wild cries from the bandstand (
“Forward and back!”
) while I sorted through hooked elbows and do-si-doing and partner swinging (
“Make a basket and kick the bottom out!”
) in search of a mad scientist who would probably just love to see what effect LSD-25 would have on an allemande left.

Was that him?

He fit all the particulars—tall, slender, white-haired, handsome, dark-eyed—though would the evil genius of Deep Creek Lake really be wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans with rolled-up cuffs, and tooled-leather cowboy boots?

The calls and fiddling and dancing went on for a good half hour before a break sent Bettie rushing over flushed and smiling to settle in next to me.

“That Piute Pete knows how to call a Girl from Arkansas,” the Girl from Tennessee said, apparently referring to a specific dance.

“You sure had a good time,” I said pointlessly, my brain elsewhere. I was figuring out how to approach this guy. First, I would go over to the bar and ask a bartender if he knew Sidney Gottlieb, who was supposedly something of a regular here, and if so, point out my suspect.…

But then I glanced up and the white-haired handsome man in blue jeans was knifing straight toward us, wearing a big grin that struck me as slightly demented. And now that he wasn't dancing, his gait betrayed a slight limp of the right leg, and a built-up boot heel.

I unbuttoned my suit coat.

He stopped abruptly at our table, and tucked his hands behind his back so he could half-bow.

“Excuse me,” he said in a rather musical baritone, “but aren't you Bettie Page?”

His speech was measured, with space between each word, as if English were his second language; but that wasn't it: This was how he battled back his stammer.

She went all Scarlett O'Hara on him. “Why, yes ah am. But ah hardly
evah
get recognized.”

He half-bowed again, this time bringing a hand around to touch his plaid-clad chest. “I'm such an admirer of your artistry, Miss Page. My name is Sid Gottlieb. Could I join you for a moment? Perhaps buy you and your friend a drink?”

Bettie glanced at me. I'd not shared the name of the subject of my search with her—in fact, I hadn't even told her I was searching—and she probably just thought a fan was crashing the party.

“Please,” I said.

All his attention was on her. “You really know how to square dance, Miss Page. I had no idea you were a country gal.”

“That's 'cause you can't hear me talk in my photos, honey.”

He beamed as he took the chair opposite us. “You know, I think we have a mutual friend—John Coutts?”

She frowned just a little, shook her head, and all that hair came along for the ride. “Ah don't believe so.”

He twitched another smile, shrugged. “Well, his sobriquet is John Willie. I had assumed you knew him, because he has so frequently used you as a model.”

“Oh,
that
character. Ah've never actually met him. He just puts me in his silly magazines and does those comic strips about me. He doesn't pay me a
dime
.” She turned to me to explain. “This Willie's a customer of Irving's.”

Gottlieb folded his hands on the table and leaned in confidentially. “I hope you don't mind talking to an enthusiast of your bondage photos. Mr. Klaw does such a
fine
job as a photographer. I mean, they're all in good fun, right?”

“It's just actin', sugah. And actually, it's Irving's sister Paula who's the shutterbug. But ah think it's dirty pool that your friend Willie uses me in his funny books without mah permission. Meanin' no offense.”

“None taken. Really, Coutts is only an acquaintance. A friend of a friend who exposed me to your work. I would
love
to have an autograph.”

“You bet, sugah.… What was your name again?”

“Sid. Gottlieb.”

She signed a Village Barn napkin to him with, “See you at the next barn dance!” Then she gestured to me and said, “Mr. Gottlieb, this is my gentleman friend—”

“Oh, I know who he is,” Gottlieb said with a snake-oil salesman's smile. “He's Nathan Heller. The famous private investigator.” Now his attention was on me. And mine had never left him. “But isn't that rather counterproductive, Mr. Heller?”

I gave him the kind of smile generally reserved for in-laws. “How so, Mr. Gottlieb?”

His eyebrows flicked up and down. “Well, in your profession, don't you count on going unrecognized? So you can do undercover work?”

“I have a staff for that kind of thing. But I suppose you're right that it's counterproductive. Rather like being a famous spy.”

A half smile tickled thin lips. “Well, a spy would not make his picture available to the press, whereas you're splashed all over various magazines. I would imagine you'd have a difficult time finding a photograph of a master spy. Of course, I'm just guessing.”

The hog-caller was back at the microphone.

Bettie gave a little “ooh” of excitement, then asked our guest if he'd care to be her partner on this next round.

“No, thank you,” he said. “I'm still catching my breath. Go ahead, please. I'll chat with your friend while you dance.”

Bettie flounced out.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, in his measured way, “I must confess I was expecting … hoping … you would be here tonight.”

“Might be hard to believe,” I said, “but this is my first square dance.”

“Hang up your coat and spit on the wall! Choose your partners and promenade all!”

“Square dancing is a great passion of mine,” he said. “Actually, folk dancing in general is. Whenever I travel, I come back with new steps. And I've been to some very interesting places. Margaret … my wife, she's not here tonight … is as much an enthusiast as I am.”

“You spoke to Mulholland,” I said, blowing past the bullshit, “and he told you he'd sent me here to find you.”

A little shrug. “And you found me.”

“And you found
me.
”

He looked at the autographed napkin with a smile. “You did us a favor, talking to Mulholland.”

“Oh?”

“Meet that gal and hold her tight! Don't forget your date for Saturday night!”

He folded the napkin and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “You obviously didn't have to work very hard to fool him into telling you anything you wanted to know.”

“That assumes he was telling me the truth. He's a magician. Maybe he was manipulating me.”

“A possibility.”

I shifted in my chair. “I'm assuming you spoke to Dr. Abramson as well.”

“I did. And your mission is obviously a noble one, and I frankly feel some of my … subordinates … have handled this matter badly.”

“The Frank Olson ‘matter,' you mean?”

“Run across and don't get lost, and give your opposite lady a toss!”

He nodded. “Not keeping Dr. Olson's wife more in the know was thoughtless and a mistake. All we've been trying to do is help Frank. He's a valued colleague.”

“Do you normally spike the drink of valued colleagues with a dangerous drug? Oh, well, I guess you do, since Olson was only one of, what? Ten? Eleven, at the retreat?”

He flipped a hand. “We all experiment on ourselves. That's the nature of what we do.”

“I would think the nature of what you do would include some scientific controls. To a layman, this all seems fairly freewheeling.”

“Around you go, just like a wheel—the faster you go, the better you feel!”

“Mr. Heller, I can assure you that everything that's been done these past several days has been with Dr. Olson's best interests at heart. My understanding is that he's phoned his wife and will be going home tomorrow.”

“That's mine as well.”

“Good. Then I believe we've reached the conclusion of this episode—and of your investigation.… What a lovely girl, Miss Page. So shockingly wholesome. I suppose that's why those pictures she poses for have such appeal. Just look at those leather boots.”

“Salute your corner lady, salute your partners all—swing your corner lady and promenade the hall!”

He rose, nodded, and threaded through the sea of tables toward the exit, the limp barely discernible.

 

CHAPTER

20

At around 2:30 a.m., the cabbie let me out on the Penn Station side of a nearly deserted Seventh Avenue, and I'd just paid him, and he'd rolled off, when I heard the cry of
“Jesus!”
from across the street.

My eyes shot to a guy in full doorman's regalia, hat and all, but not in front of the Statler Hotel, rather rounding the corner from Thirty-third Street, and looking up like he'd just spotted Superman. In a split second, I'd followed his upward-jutting chin and pointing finger to the blur of white, in midair, coming from well above.

I stood frozen in disbelief as the blur became a man who seemed to be diving, hands in front of him. Then he twisted and was suddenly coming down feet-first, as if only he could land that way everything would be all right, but his hands knew better, clawing at the air above him as if trying to grab onto it. With the sidewalk waiting to meet him, he hit a wooden partition covering some work on the entrance area of the hotel bar, then bounced off the plywood wall, landing feet-first on the sidewalk with a sound like the cracking of thick crisp celery stalks.

I already knew.

It was a big hotel, the Statler, probably a couple of thousand rooms, and this could have been any unhappy guest who'd decided in a dark moment that the best way out of the place was through a high window.

But I knew it wasn't just any guest.

The Village Barn always stayed open late, the 1:30 a.m. show well under way when Bettie and I had finally left and walked over to her apartment. She was on the fourth floor, a walk-up, and the place was nothing to write home about but she'd made it cute, painting the walls pink here or lilac there, the furnishings a mix of atomic-age modern and nice secondhand '30s Art Moderne. We sat in the kitchenette at a little wooden table and had some brandy and she told me what a wonderful evening she'd had.