Majic Man nh-10 Page 8

  “I suppose I’m on your Nazi collaborators list, now.”

  “No. But whether you like it or not, you’re a Jew-and that puts you on a lot of other lists, all of ’em shit lists…. Damn, that drink went right through me. I’m gonna use the can-you still be here when I get back?”

  “You want me to be?”

  Kollek put out his cigar, his smile turning gentle. “Please. And no more serious talk, tonight. This place is gonna close up pretty soon-if you wanna hear some good Negro jazz, I’ll take you over to the Hide-away Club, in Georgetown, after-hours joint.”

  “What’s this, the soft-soap portion of your recruitment process?”

  “Stick around and see.”

  He trundled off toward the john and, moments later, the tackle got up from the postage-stamp table and headed after him; it was about as subtle as the Ritz Brothers doing their Snow White routine. I took the last sip of my drink, and decided I’d use the men’s room, too, seeing as how the tackle had gone in on Kollek’s heels.

  I pushed the door open and found myself in a medium-size men’s room-two urinals, two stalls, two sinks, two men on the floor, tussling, missionary-style.

  The tackle was on top of a squirming, wriggling Kollek, whose arms were pinned by the guy’s massive thighs; the tackle was bringing his arm back, and as that arm had a canned-ham-size fist on the end of it, I figured he was planning to rearrange Kollek’s features.

  Kollek saw me come in, brightening at the prospect of rescue, and the tackle looked my way, too, but not in time to stop me from grabbing with both hands onto his fist and arm and tug-of-warring him off Kollek, enough for Teddy to squirm free and get to his feet, his spiffy green sportcoat wrinkled and moisture-spotted, some of it piss, probably, some of it sink water, some of it blood: Kollek’s nose was bleeding-he’d already taken a punch. The tackle’s face was contorted in reddened rage.

  I let go of the guy’s arm, retreated a couple steps, held out my palms and said, “This doesn’t have to get any uglier than it already is … there’s two of us … now back off.”

  Kollek, breathing hard, had already backed off, by the far, high-windowed wall. His eyes were wild and scared shitless above the palm cupping his bloody nose.

  On one knee, the tackle, still grimacing fiercely, reached inside his suitcoat and, before he could bring a gun out, I kicked his balls up inside him; his anguished cry echoed in the tiled room, like an animal that had taken a spear.

  As every man knows, the son of a bitch should have been paralyzed by that pain, but-amazingly, frighteningly-he instead got quickly to his feet while simultaneously swinging a massive fist at my face, narrowly missing as I ducked it, then threw myself at him, tackling the tackle, driving him into the door of a stall, through that door and into the stall, where the stool caught him in the back of his legs, sitting him down hard, not for a dump, but for two fast right hands, interspersed with a fast left, a one-two-three combination that knocked him out, leaving him sprawled on the pot, head against the wall where it said “For a good time, call Irene.”

  He may have had brass balls, but his goddamn jaw was glass.

  I checked inside his suitcoat for the gun, and there was a gun, yes, but not in a shoulder holster where I thought it would be, and not on the side of him where he’d reached: a .38 snubnose Colt in a cross-draw holster on his belt. What the hell had he been reaching for, then?

  His wallet, maybe?

  “Oh shit,” I said, knowing.

  His credentials.

  The tackle’s name was Gary W. Niebuhr and he was employed by the federal government; he was, in fact, an FBI agent. If he’d gotten a good enough look at me, this might wind up yet another glowing entry in one of J. Edgar’s favorite files.

  “What the hell have you got me into?” I snarled at Kollek, who was at the sink, wetting a paper towel for his nose.

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” he said.

  “What, were you resisting arrest?”

  Kollek nodded.

  I suggested we scram, and-leaving Agent Niebuhr in his stall, sleeping soundly-we scrammed, just as another patron was heading in, seeking relief, a sentiment I could well understand.

  As we moved quickly down the stairs to the street, an embarrassed Kollek said, “That’s why I had to shut down the office over the Copa. The FBI had our phones tapped; I been under surveillance for months. Somehow we aroused the Bureau’s suspicions.”

  “Do you suppose it was the arms smuggling and hanging out with gangsters?”

  He looked sheepish as we reached the sidewalk. “Most of my network’s already been arrested.”

  “Thanks for saving this information for last.”

  “No hard feelings…. I could use a man like you, Nate.”

  “Give it up, Teddy. I’ll take a raincheck on the Hideaway Club.”

  I was moving through the pleasantly cool evening toward where I’d parked my car.

  Kollek was jogging off in the opposite direction, disappearing into the shadows, but calling out: “I’m afraid I can’t give you a number where I can be contacted!”

  “Somehow I’ll manage to get over that,” I said, got in my car and got the hell out of there.

  Fucking zealots, anyway.

  6

  The “most feared and hated man in Washington, D.C.”-as the Washington Times-Herald had termed him, with neither affection nor irony-lived in a typically dignified Georgetown townhouse so evocative of bygone days that you might expect to see a gloved gent in stovepipe and muttonchops stroll down the steps to the cobblestone lane where a horse-drawn coach awaited.

  But on this sunny Sunday afternoon on Dumbarton Avenue, you would instead have seen only a gloveless guy in a tan fedora and dark blue shantung suit going up those steps, and trying the polished brass knocker at the door of the home/office of Drew Pearson.

  Speaking of knockers, it would have been more fun trying those of the healthy young woman who answered-a buxom lass of perhaps twenty with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face.

  “Who is, sir?” she asked, in a middle-European accent similar to, but much more fetching than, Teddy Kollek’s.

  She stood at attention in a crisp, streamlined white dress with thin vertical blue stripes (well, as vertical as they could be, considering her figure) and white collar and cuffs; she looked like a nurse in one of my dirtier dreams.

  “Would you tell your boss his overdue account from Chicago is here?”

  She frowned, full red-rouged lips forming a pouty kiss. “Excuse, please?”

  So English was her second language; still, I’d wager her job description read “Secretary.” Clearly she was the latest office “fair-haired girl,” as Pearson’s veteran employees dubbed them, “cutie-pies” as the boss described each lucky girl singled out for such special services as enlivening cocktail parties and accompanying him on out-of-town speaking engagements.

  “Just tell the big cheese Nate Heller is here.”

  “Big …?”

  “Nate Heller, honey.”

  “Very busy today.” She frowned again and shook her shimmering golden locks; it was cuter than a box of puppies. “Mr. Pearson see no one on broadcast day.”

  I dug out one of my cards and handed it to her. “Just give him this-I’ll wait.”

  Soon she was back, equal parts solicitude and pulchritude, smelling like lilacs (or anyway lilac perfume), hugging my arm, yanking me into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the house.

  “I am too sorry, Mr. Heller,” she said, batting long lashes, putting the accent on the second syllable of my name.

  A modern living room was straight ahead, down a couple steps, and to the left, also sunken, was a formal dining room with a kitchen glimpsed beyond.

  “Honey, I’m almost over it,” I said, taking off my hat.

  That confused her for a second, but then she grinned, showing crooked teeth I was perfectly willing to forgive, and lugged me down two steps to the right, through a do
orway into a book-, paper- and keepsake-arrayed study where the air was riddled with the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of typing. To one side of a wide, wooden desk, at a typewriter stand, his back to us, a large (not fat) bald man in a maroon smoking jacket was hammering away at the keys.

  The blonde looked at me gravely and held up her hand, in case I was thinking of speaking: the boss was not to be interrupted while he was creating.

  A window fan was churning up air. Off to the right of the fairly small room, visible (and audible) through the open doorway, a desk-cluttered workroom bustled with two men and a trio of women typing or talking on the phone or attending the clattering wire-service ticker or putting something in or getting something out of one of the endless gray-steel filing cabinets lining the walls. While these secretaries were not unattractive, they-unlike my blonde escort-had the businesslike apparel and bespectacled, pencil-tucked-behind-the-ear manner of professional women. Depending on the profession, of course.

  Drew Pearson’s profession was journalism, or anyway a peculiar variant of his own creation. At one time just another Washington newspaperman covering the State Department for the Baltimore Sun, Pearson had taken the gossip-column style of New York’s Walter Winchell and Hollywood’s Louella Parsons and grafted it-to use a fitting term-onto the Washington political scene.

  The column-“The Washington Merry-Go-Round”-initially had not been solely Pearson’s. The Christian Science Monitor’s D.C. correspondent, Robert S. Allen, had come up with the idea for a hard-hitting book that would expose both the personal peccadilloes and political chicanery of our country’s leaders, particularly those in the Herbert Hoover administration.

  Bob Allen did most of the writing, but brought his pal Pearson aboard as a collaborator for a few chapters because Drew knew the social scene, his mother-in-law being the powerful newspaperwoman and socialite Cissy Patterson. The book, published anonymously in 1931, was a huge best-seller and made tidal-type waves that started in Washington and splashed across the nation; the pissed-off President sicced the FBI on the case, to ferret out the identities of the contemptible authors.

  Exposed, Allen and Pearson were fired by their papers, but Pearson-giving himself top billing-took the notion of the book to a newspaper syndicate, United Features, which snapped it up. The column was a sensation, and Pearson hogged the spotlight, and became the country’s best-known crusader for liberal causes. With World War Two imminent, Bob Allen left the column to enlist in the Army; Pearson took that opportunity to remove his partner’s name, refusing to pay Allen, or his wife, a dime while he was away. When Allen returned, a colonel who’d lost an arm in combat, he found he’d lost his column, as well.

  The man at the typewriter stopped typing, yanked the page out of the machine and, without turning, tossed the page on the desk, on which paper-filled wooden intake boxes were lined, a regal black cat sleeping quietly in one of them.

  “Get that added to the script, Anya,” he commanded in a rather harsh, clipped baritone. Pearson had trained himself to sound like a more dignified Walter Winchell when “Washington Merry-Go-Round” had become a radio show as well as a column.

  “Yes, sir!” The blonde leaned over to snatch up the typed page, and the plump globes of her behind under the blue-striped nurse’s dress tilted up invitingly.

  “That’s a good girl. Now shut the door behind you.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  And she scampered out.

  He scooted over on his chair till he was behind the big desk, and twisted around like a kid on a soda fountain stool, to where I could see him. His rather large head was shaped like-and had only a little more hair than-an egg; his eyes crowded a strong, prominent nose and his mouth was no wider than his well-waxed, pointed-tipped mustache. A white shirt and maroon-and-black tie peeked out from under the smoking jacket.

  “What a cutie-pie,” Pearson purred, looking toward where Anya had exited.

  The sleeping cat echoed him with its own purring.

  “You lucky bastard,” I said.

  He stood, rising to his full six three, and extended his hand over the messy desk and the tidy cat. “Nice to see you, too, Nathan. Jack said you were in town.”

  “I hear he’s a Mormon,” I said, shaking his clammy hand. “Is he a Mormon like you’re a Quaker?”

  Raised in that faith, Pearson only used the “thee” and “thou” routine at dinnertime with family, and while he didn’t smoke, he had a reputation for hard drinking.

  He lifted an eyebrow, as he sat back down. “You understand this is broadcast day. I can only give you a few minutes.”

  Ignoring that, I prowled his office. The dark-painted plaster walls wore framed original newspaper cartoons featuring Pearson, and photos of him with various political figures, including the last two presidents. A primitive rural landscape in oil-a relative’s work, apparently-hung near a portrait of a man who might have been his father; snapshots were lined up along the mantelpiece of a working fireplace, and the window-sills were piled with books and papers.

  “Why don’t you buy yourself a new typewriter?” I asked, nodding toward the battered Corona on the typing stand. “Live a little.”

  “That machine was given to me by my father”-and he nodded toward the portrait, confirming my suspicion-“in 1922. It’s my pride and joy; take it with me on trips, and nobody touches it but me.”

  “How do you get away with that?”

  “When it breaks down, I simply get it fixed at a certain small machine shop-”

  “I was talking about the blonde.” I shook my head. “Right under your wife’s nose?”

  His wife, Luvie, was an elegant, model-thin blonde; his second wife, actually-he’d stolen her, like his column, from a close friend.

  “Well, she’s at the farm today,” he said, “but she doesn’t mind my dalliances. Boys will be boys. She understands my appetites.”

  “Does she have a sister?”

  “Who? Luvie or Anya?”

  I pulled up a chair and sat. “Where’s the blonde from, anyway? Transylvania?”

  “Yugoslavia. War refugee.”

  “You are a public-spirited son of a bitch. And open-minded by not insisting that your secretary speak or write English. You’re in arrears three hundred bucks, by the way.”

  Pearson tilted his chin and looked down his considerable nose at me. “Your expense account was outlandishly out of line. We’ll call it even-or you could always sue, though you’d have to take a number.” He was smiling; he smiled a lot, a smile that creased his eyes into slits.

  “Didn’t do General MacArthur much good, did it?”

  “None whatsoever,” Pearson chuckled. He had a quiet, gentlemanly manner, and the chilly, aloof bearing of an ambassador to some unimportant country. “By the way, does your current client know of our past association?” He posed this mildly, sitting forward, stroking his cat, its back arching.

  “No,” I admitted.

  In the mid-thirties I’d done a few jobs for Pearson, having been recommended to him by another former client of mine, Evalyn Walsh McClean, wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, owner of the Hope diamond, and a prominent if eccentric D.C. socialite and party-giver. Evalyn was a friend of Pearson’s first wife and her mother.

  The initial work I’d done for the columnist had been so long ago, it well predated my relationship with Forrestal, and had apparently not made my FBI file, or Baughman would have rubbed my face in it, the other night.

  And the government apparently wasn’t aware that, as I’d mentioned to Jack Anderson, I’d done some work in Chicago for Pearson, not long ago, despite swearing I never would again, as he really was the cheapest son of a bitch on the planet. He negotiated you down to nothing, then took forever to pay.

  “Your client’s ignorance of our past history,” Pearson said, “puts you in a delicate position, Nathan-and me at an advantage.”

  “Sure it’s not the other way around,” I asked, “since I know how you’re getting inside info
from Forrestal’s house? If I tell Jim about that colored maid, he’ll fire her … but then, of course, maybe you could hire her as your next secretary.”

  He just smiled, corners of his mustache up, eyes lost in slits. “For a man who’s been in your tawdry profession for as long as you have, Nathan, you have a less than firm grasp of blackmail.”

  “Well, hell … then I’ll defer to the master.”

  That didn’t seem to offend him in the least. Amid the mess on his desk was a glass jar filled with small chocolate chip cookies; he lifted the lid, plucked one out and began nibbling it. “Would you like one, Nathan? Anya made them.”

  “How much are they?”

  “Now that’s unkind. I pride myself on being a gracious host. You’re the one charging fees; you’re the tradesman.”

  “And knowing your politics, Drew, I’m sure you mean that in the nicest way, friend to the working-man that you are.”

  He took a last bite of cookie, chewed it and swallowed before speaking. “How do you think Jim Forrestal-in his current delicate mental condition-would react to the news that his trusted investigator has done numerous jobs for his archnemesis-yours truly?”

  Obviously, it would further fuel his paranoid delusions and I’d be out on my ass.

  But I said, “Jim knows I’m not terribly particular about who I work for.”

  Pearson selected another cookie. “And does he know your loyalty is to the dollar?”

  “Now you’re being unkind. But then that’s your stock-in-trade, isn’t it?”

  He bristled a little, leaned back in the chair. “My stock-in-trade is telling the truth, and letting the chips fall where they may.”

  Chocolate or otherwise.

  “Telling the truth, Drew, like that story about Forrestal running away from robbers who stripped his wife of her jewels and money? The truth is, Jo Forrestal was on her way home from a party, with another man, and Forrestal wasn’t even at the scene. You knew that and printed the lie, anyway.”

  He shrugged, rocking gently, nibbling his cookie. “It could have been worse-I could have told the real truth: that he and his wife live a sham marriage.”