Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 (2 page)

These occasional profane eruptions, from so chic a source, seemed calculated to me; she seemed to want my attention. Well, she already had that—her husband had paid for it.

“This burg does seem a little dull,” I admitted. “There’s more nightlife at a monastery.”

Her eyes and nostrils flared. “You are so very right! No theater, no fashion, no art! No one to talk to, or anyway no one worth talking to. Nobody but these hypocritical fucking pompous politicians and petty fucking public officials with one hand in your pocket and the other on your ass.”

From over at the signpost, the stallion whinnied, as if underscoring its mistress’ displeasure.

“Okay, then,” I said. “It’s a dull town. We got that much established.”

She laughed a little, mildly embarrassed. “Sorry. I guess I should’ve brought my cigarettes.”

“What’s really bothering you, Jo?” I asked gently. “Why do you need a detective?”

She swallowed and the confidence vanished; suddenly she seemed trembly as a bird, and the melodious voice took on an unexpected shrillness.

“It’s my boys,” she said. “Michael and Peter. They’re going to kidnap my boys.”

“Who is?”

“I’m … I’m not sure. This is going to sound crazy, Nate.”

“Try me.”

“Jim’s made a lot of enemies. You know, everybody talks about the Nazis, Hitler this, Hitler that. But in the great scheme of things, they’re nothing.” She clutched my hand; squeezed. “It’s the Reds we have to worry about, Nate—the Reds!”

“The Russians, you mean.”

“Yes, but more likely their … minions.”

“Have there been threats?”

“No, but they follow me. They listen to everything I say, they’ve tapped the phones, bugged our house. Why the hell d’you think I wanted to meet you in the fucking park?”

I thought,
Because your house isn’t air-conditioned?

But I said, “Wise precaution.”

She was shaking her head; the black scythe blades of hair swung. “But it’s more, so much more than just the surveillance…. I’ve always been sensitive, Nate. Do you believe in extrasensory perception? Psychic powers?”

“Sure,” I lied.

The big dark eyes got bigger, brighter. “Well, I’ve had dreams … vivid dreams. And I have good intuition, I can sense danger, the way … an animal can. Like a horse knows when to rear up.”

“Instinctively.”

“Yes! And Michael and Peter, they’re just boys, they’re so helpless … Michael’s thirteen, Peter eleven, they’re off at private school, at Aiken School … that’s in South Carolina.”

“And you sense they’re in danger.”

“Yes. But not just them … me, Jim, my family, my friends … any way they can get to us. There’s so much treachery all around us.”

“What sort of treachery?”

She frowned, turned her thoughts inward. “I sense it, but also I catch them behaving suspiciously.”

“Who?”

“The household staff, for one.”

“I see.”

“You need to investigate all of them! And Jim’s assistants at the Navy Department, and I’ll make you a list of my newer acquaintances …”

“Why them?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Isn’t it convenient that they’ve suddenly become my friends at this particular stage? Doesn’t that make your hackles tingle?”

My hackles were tingling, all right, but I just said, “You’re right—make me that list, it’ll be helpful.”

“You may find that many of these people … perhaps even all of them … are working together to harm everything near and dear to me. The only person I trust is Jim—and that’s why I asked him to bring somebody in from outside, someone that he trusted. You, Nate.”

“I appreciate your confidence in me, Jo.” I patted her hand. “And I promise you I’ll give this my full attention. I’m not going to let anything happen to you or your boys.”

“Or Jim!”

“Or Jim.”

“Thank you, Nate …”

And she half-rose, leaning across the picnic table, and kissed me full on the lips.

She was gazing at me rather lasciviously, stroking my face as I said, “You’re welcome,” and then she stood, the nervousness gone, the confidence snapping back into place, and strode over to her horse, untied it, mounted and galloped off.

Now Jo Forrestal was clearly nuttier than a Baby Ruth bar, but her husband had come to the conclusion that the best way to snap her out of this was for me to take her fears seriously, and do a full, for real investigation. Forrestal figured that by demonstrating to her that her suspicions had no basis in reality, his wife would return to reality, herself. I didn’t know whether I agreed with this approach or not, though I did agree with his thousand-buck minimum retainer.

“This business with the Reds is my fault,” Forrestal admitted to me over the phone. “I’m afraid Jo has heard me rail on about the Communist threat to such an extent that it’s entered into her alcoholic delusions.”

So I spent a month doing full background checks on Forrestal’s household staff, his assistants at the Navy Department and Jo Forrestal’s new D.C. acquaintances. I also had the house swept for electronic bugs, and kept the place (and Jo Forrestal, and later Jim Forrestal) under surveillance for several days each, to see if anybody else was watching them. Finally I spent a week at the Aiken School in South Carolina where Michael and Peter Forrestal were enrolled. I got to know the boys—sweet, reserved kids—and the faculty, as well. I knew all of this was wheel-spinning, but the money was good.

And of course I discovered no kidnap plan, no electronic bugs, no Reds under any beds, and nobody conspiring against Jo Forrestal, with one notable, and possibly irrelevant, exception. As a by-product of my investigation and surveillance, I discovered that Jim Forrestal was a first-class tomcat.

This guy went out with more good-looking women than Errol Flynn, and his crowd seemed to know about it, and accept it. He frequently took babes other than Mrs. Forrestal to afternoon teas or cocktail parties, before heading downtown to one of several assignation hotels; where the Under Secretary of the Navy was concerned, the fleet was always in. If Jo Forrestal had been my client, and this a divorce case, I’d have had the goods.

When I presented my detailed report to Forrestal (which of course omitted his philandering), I gently brought the subject up.

“I may be out of line, Jim,” I said, “but your wife’s drinking, and her mental condition, might be her way of sending you a message.”

“I don’t follow you, Nate.” He was again seated behind his big desk, puffing a pipe, looking wiser than Sophocles.

“Hey, maybe I’m not qualified to make this call, I mean I’m no head doctor … but if she feels threatened, maybe it’s all the dames you’re bangin’, on the side.”

That impassive puss of his remained that way. Finally he said, quietly, “I’ve placed my trust in you, Nate. I hope you don’t plan to take advantage of my faith in you with some cheap extortion scheme.”

“Hell no. You’re paying me plenty. It’s just … you got a smart, good-looking wife. She’s got herself in a mental jam. Maybe what she needs is some attention from the guy she married.”

“You’re right.”

“That’s okay …”

“You’re not qualified.”

I shrugged, and rose. “No extra charge for the unwanted advice…. You want me to present this report to Mrs. Forrestal?”

Perhaps my mentioning what I knew about his extracurricular activities colored his judgment, but at any rate he hefted my typed report and said, “No. This will be quite sufficient. Thank you, Nate.”

Obviously, I’d had occasional contact with Jo Forrestal throughout the investigation, and we’d become friendly, though I’d kept my distance after that kiss she deposited on me, at our first meeting. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when she showed up that night at my room at the Ambassador.

I also wasn’t surprised she was drunk: I had discovered, during my tenure as a Forrestal employee, that the only time she didn’t drink was when she went out riding.

She wore a classic black dress, side-buttoned and beautifully draped over her slender curves; the black arcs of her hair barely brushed her shoulders. Liquor didn’t make a weaving wreck of her: the only major indications she was smashed were how hooded those big dark eyes were, and how exquisitely foul her mouth got.

Still in the doorway, she said, “I read that feeble fucking excuse for a report of yours.”

I was in T-shirt and slacks, just getting ready to shave and go out for supper. “Jo, I did a thorough job. Nobody’s trying to kidnap your boys; nobody’s trying to hurt you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, and brushed by me. I had a small suite, and the outer area boasted a couch and a few chairs, as well as a wet bar with a single bottle of Ronrico rum and some warm Cokes, and a table where I could work, my portable typewriter and various field notes still arrayed there. She went immediately to the bar, fetched the ice bucket and thrust it into my arms.

“Fill it,” she said.

I went out and down the hall to an ice machine and filled the bucket and came back; fixed two water glasses of rum and Coke and ice, and joined her on the couch, where she sat, smoking.

“You disappoint me,” she said, taking the drink.

“The Reds aren’t out to get you. Honest.”

“You didn’t dig deep enough. You didn’t look close enough.”

“I dug. I looked.”

She clutched my arm—my bare arm. Her nails, which were painted blood red, dug into my flesh. “They’re insidious, Nate. You’ve got to stay on the case.”

“There’s no case, Jo. This town is just getting to you.”

“Fucking town!” She gulped at the rum and Coke, then gulped at it two more times, finishing it. She stabbed her cigarette out and stalked over to the wet bar and was making another (with damn little Coke), as she said, “Jim’s the only one I can trust. Jim, and you.”

Why did
I
have her trust?

She settled in next to me, answering my unspoken question. “The same instincts that tell me who to suspect, tell me who to trust. And I trust you, Nate.”

“Jo, nobody’s after you. Really. Truly.”

“Nate, you
have
to help me….”

And she kissed me. There was urgency in it, and something that might have been passion, and I felt her arms slip around me.

“I need you, Nate.” She pressed my right hand to her small firm left breast. “Please help me.”

This time she put her tongue in my mouth, and she was a lovely woman, but she was drunk, and she was nuts. Plus, she was my client’s wife.

On the other hand, the asshole was catting around on her, so it would serve the bastard right….

“No,” I said, pushing her gently away. “Jo, we’re not going to step over that line.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, pressing against me, slender fingers finding their way into my hair, a giddiness working itself into her voice. “My husband wouldn’t mind—we’ve always had an open marriage, Jim and I. We’ve both always been fiercely independent! Free spirits….”

As free spirits went, Jo was in one hell of a cage, and her pipe-sucking Brooks Brothers husband was an unlikely candidate for tree nymph.

Besides, in shadowing both of them, I’d seen Forrestal score with half a dozen dames in under two weeks, and Jo’s assignations were strictly with booze bottles.

So I pulled away, rose, poured her another drink, and stuck to my story: nobody was after her or her boys. An hour—and three drinks and six cigarettes—later she seemed to be listening to reason.

She was shaking her head, staring into her sickness. “But these dreams—what you say are
delusions
… they’re so vivid, Nate. The feelings seem so real.”

“The feelings in you are real,” I said, and took both her hands in mine and looked right at her, made sure she was looking back at me. “Listen—let me tell you something about myself that I don’t tell just anybody.”

She smiled sexily; and she was sexy, bonkers or not, drunk or sober. “You’d share something personal with me, Nate? Something private?”

“Yes,” I said, and I told her about my father killing himself with my gun.

“He was an old union guy,” I explained, “and he hated the cops, he hated the system, but I managed to get myself on the police department, and it ate him up inside. Later on, when he found out I lied on the witness stand, for money, he used my nine-millimeter to blow his brains out. And I found him like that, at his kitchen table.”

Her eyes weren’t hooded, now. “Oh, Nate …”

“Anyway, I had some problems sleeping after that. I saw a guy, what they used to call an alienist.”

“A psychiatrist?”

“Yeah. And it helped.”

“You think … you think that’s what I should do?”

“Yes. Talk to somebody like that, who can help you sort out the truth from the bullshit.”

She just sat there quietly for the longest time; and suddenly the former
Vogue
model seemed like a little girl, a kid.

And in a kid’s tiny voice, she said, “All right. I’ll do it.”

Then she kissed me again, and I might have reconsidered my noble stance where bedding her was concerned, but the truth is, I had just enough time to still make my date with Jeannie from the Farm Credit Administration (who maybe had a little to do with this story, after all). So if my conscience kept me from sleeping with Jo Forrestal, that conscience was blonde.

And that would have been the end of it, if it hadn’t been the beginning.