Better Dead (40 page)

“For this exchange to carry any weight,” he said with a lazy smile, getting out a pack of Chesterfields from a suit coat pocket, “we have to be honest with each other. So frankly, Nate, I don't appreciate you failin' to mention that your involvement with Frank Olson began with Senator McCarthy.”

How much did he know?

Probably everything. So I said fine, and told him that McCarthy had wanted me to check Olson out as a possible source for dirt on the Agency, for an upcoming Senate investigation he hoped to mount; but that the incident at Deep Creek Lake had sent me in another direction, which was to help Alice Olson.

“What
about
Alice Olson, Shep? What am I to tell her?”

He had long since lighted up the Chesterfield, and had offered me one, too, which I declined, any combat mood having passed. An hour ago, I'd have grabbed for it.

He said, cool but with an edge, “You're not to tell Alice Olson
anything.
You're to stay away from the woman. Don't go to the funeral, either.”

“Christ, man, she hired me to—”

“Oh, you'll call her, later today … but no mention of the Statler and the events that ensued. She's not to find out anything more about Deep Creek Lake than she already knows, especially the LSD-25 in her husband's after-dinner drink. Nate, that is strictly classified. Just give her your condolences and tell her you're sorry to have disappointed her.” One eyebrow rose and the gap-toothed grin flashed. “Surely, you've disappointed women before, Nate.”

“Amused by all this, are you?”

His expression turned somber. “Sorry. No offense meant, my friend. If you view all of this as a tragedy, I can certainly understand and commiserate.”

He glanced at his Rolex.

His chin went up and he said, “In just a few minutes, Colonel Ruwet—Dr. Olson's immediate superior at Camp Detrick, with the family doctor along for support—will arrive at the Olson home and give Alice Olson the terrible news.”

“What terrible news is that, Shep? You're going to need a better story than saying her husband ran through a closed hotel room window at about thirty miles an hour—a speed he'd worked up to in the space of maybe twelve feet.”

“There is,” Shep admitted, smoke seeping through the gap between front teeth, “some fine-tunin' that needs doing. For now, all that Mrs. Olson will learn—and this is what the press will get—is that her husband jumped or fell from a tenth-floor window at his Manhattan hotel.”

“The press will want more.”

He gestured with an open hand. “Of course, and they'll get the standard obituary material …
and
be told that Dr. Olson was in town to get medical treatment for his depression.”

“You'll just leave out the part where he gets slipped an LSD-25 mickey, and that the ‘shrink' he went to was an allergist.”

Shep twitched a smile, tapped some cigarette ash on the floor. “Leave the details to us,” he said, ignoring my sarcasm. “In fact, you need to leave it
all
to us. You'll be leavin' town as soon as possible.”

I frowned. “You want me back in Chicago?”

“No, and not in L.A., either, not where you have offices and are well known. Take a break, Nate. Go someplace sunny and warm, and vacation for a week or two on the government's tab. Take the little doll along. Florida, maybe. She'll look swell in a bikini. By the way … do we need to worry about her, Nate?”

I shook my head, kept my voice calm. “No. She's confused about what happened anyway—I think they slipped her some of your LSD shit. I'll handle her.”

His voice had a sudden hardness. “Good. You'll
nee
d to, because if she doesn't behave, we'll have to step in.”

Emphatic now, I said, “There'll be
no
need. What about the, uh, men I … left back there at your safe house? They have friends, families—they can't just disappear, can they?”

He gave me a facial shrug. “You might be surprised. Anyway, it's our problem now, son. You're out of it. In the clear.”

I shifted in the hard chair. “So then I just skip, and stay ahead of the cops? But what's my story when they catch up to me?”

He waved a dismissive hand. “They won't. Stay out of sight for a week, at least, and we'll have everything tidied up. You'll be the Little Man Who Wasn't There—you've been him
before,
right?”

I had.

“Of course,” he said offhandedly, stubbing out his cigarette on the floor under his toe, “you may prefer to go to the police and tell them what
really
happened … includin' the two men you killed last night, or should I say this morning?… And then maybe you'll want to discuss with the authorities the woman and the three men you killed last April.… Or would you prefer that I continue to keep all of that mum?”

I said nothing as I watched him light up a second cigarette.

Then I said, “You can't put me on the spot, Shep, without incriminating the Agency.”

Now he grinned big and smoke flowed out of his mouth like steam. “And who do you suppose is in a better position to deal with that kind of contingency—a private investigator or the Central Intelligence Agency?”

The pack of Chesterfields and his Zippo lighter were on the table between us. I helped myself to a smoke.

I lighted up, drew deep, held it, then sighed it out. “What's the score on the Statler guy? And what the hell was one of
Costello's
boys doing there?”

He shrugged. “Ex-Costello. My understandin' is that he and another like him got fired by the esteemed Prime Minister of the Underworld earlier this year … after they fucked up a simple visit to a hotel room to fetch somebody or other into their boss's presence. Vince—whose last name you don't need, 'less you keep track of your kills in a little book or somethin'—is …
was
 … a Lucchese soldier for some while. We have dealings with these people here and abroad, you see. They can be handy people to know.”

Somebody dropped a dish and it shattered.

I leaned closer. “You're saying the Agency's in bed with the mob?”

“I wouldn't say ‘in bed.'” Another shrug, another smile. “Surely you've heard how Luciano helped us with the dockworker unions during the war, and how his people helped out with intelligence in Sicily. In our line of work, Nate, it pays to have friends in all sorts of places. As for the young man at the Statler, he's ours.
Was
ours. We placed him there because we've used the hotel for meetings and such, and havin' an inside man on staff's desirable. He served us well at several other hotels the last few years, too, usually as a bellman. But Mr. Martin was obviously in over his head in this particular exercise.”

If my eyes got any wider, they might fall out and roll around on the table. “I'll keep that in mind, Shep—that in future, if I rub up against a hood or a bellboy, it might be one of your agents.”

He leaned in, half-smiling. “Nate, you're rather overstatin' affairs. You see, the Agency has agents, certainly, and employees—Dr. Olson was one, as is Dr. Gottlieb. But we also have what we term ‘Special Employees,' which is to say individuals who do undercover work for us in the course and context of their own separate employment … a security man at a hotel, say, or a federal narcotics agent, a doctor like Abramson, even a magician like Mulholland.”

I grunted a laugh. “Handy people to know, like you said. Well, Shep, not to disappoint you, but I have no desire to join those ranks.”

His eyebrows went up a little. “But Nate … you already
have
. Not a ‘Special Employee,' no. What you are, Nate, is an asset. An asset is someone the Agency can call upon now and then for help. An asset is someone who can be relied upon for his discretion.”

The back of my neck was prickling. “And if I don't
care
to be an asset, then I'm … a liability?”

He flicked ash on the floor again. “No one's forcing you to work for us. You can walk out of here right now. You can go to the police or Mr. Hoover's FBI and take your chances about those six people you killed in this city this year. All here in the Village. Pretty impressive box score, actually.”

The thing on my face was only technically a smile. “Or I could always just tell you and your people to go fuck yourselves.”

He nodded. “An option. A definite option. You can just keep it all to yourself and go about your business and we can go about ours, and possibly never the twain shall meet.” Coldness came back into his voice. “Or maybe two years from today, somebody will hand you a drink with something lethal in it that Doc Gottlieb whipped up … or four years from Sunday, someone may brush by you on the street and that little pinprick you barely feel is a delayed gift of something fatal that Frank Olson cooked up in his lab, between practical jokes.”

I took more smoke in. Let it out.

“You've made your point,” I admitted. “But if I'm on the team—even if I prefer to warm the bench—what about Frank Olson? Are you really going to try to pass him off as a suicide?”

A big shrug this time, and more ashes on the floor. “Well, isn't he? Wasn't it suicidal of him—a scientist researching how security risks can be controlled or ‘brainwashed' or disposed of—to approach Senator
McCarthy
? And then to talk to you, with your association with Drew Pearson, one of the few journalists who wouldn't be afraid to print anything he had on us.… Didn't Frank Olson spend every day after that retreat tellin' his superiors he wanted to walk away from his top-secret job? Sayin' that he just wanted to disappear? Well, now he has. Into history. As a suicidal scientist who cracked up.”

I sipped my coffee but it had grown as cold as Shep's eyes and voice.

I said, “Was that Chestnut Lodge chestnut something you and Gottlieb came up with? Saying that Olson first said he'd go willingly, but fought back when your minions came for him in the middle of the night? Or were Martin and Vince
really
sent there in the wee hours to simply fling Frank Olson out a high window?”

“Does it matter?” His laugh had little humor in it. “Oh, there's a Chestnut Lodge all right, but Frank Olson knew it wasn't as benign as it sounded, because he knew of security risks who'd been sent there—for shock treatment, chemical therapy, even lobotomies.”

My hands were fists. “What
really
happened, Shep?”

“Well, him bein' waked up by men who arrive unannounced to haul him off to Chestnut Lodge? And him
fightin'
them, not wantin' to make that trip? Why, that makes all the sense in the world. But then so does just throwin' him out a window—Agency's better off with him dead, after all.”

“Shep—
what … really … happened?
”

“You choose, Nate. First way's manslaughter, second's murder. Either way, you killed the two men responsible, so whatever makes you warm at night, you just go with that.”

“You're saying you don't know.”

“I'm sayin' that's all you get.”

“What about Gottlieb's man Lashbrook?”

“What about him?”

“He just sat back and watched this happen?”

A one-shoulder shrug. “Probably didn't watch. Probably tucked himself away in that bathroom and waited it out—
whichever
way it happened. You want more, Nate? I'm not givin' it to you. We're finished on this subject.”

I pushed anyway. “What happens to Gottlieb?”

His frown evidenced mild irritation. “This got botched on the doc's watch, no question. To some degree, it was a comedy of errors—the man who
should
have been in charge of the Olson operation, a federal narcotics agent who looks after the Bedford Street safe house for us, well, he got called out of town. His mother died.”

“Be sure to let me know where to send a sympathy card.”

He ignored that. “John Martin and his Sicilian friend Vince were assigned the task, and that rests on Gottlieb's shoulders. I assure you, he'll be reprimanded.”

“Reprimanded.”

“Yes. And disciplined.”

I leaned halfway across the table. “I should have ‘reprimanded'
him
out a high window! And my guess is, he
likes
being disciplined, if it involves that sick shit in your safe house.”

“That's uncalled for.”

“Fuck you, Shep. Do you know the kinds of things your road-show Frankenstein is up to? That he's dosing unwitting subjects with this LSD-25 shit and God knows what else?”

He tossed a hand. “A necessary evil.”

“Necessary! For Christ's sake,
how
can it be…?”

His expression turned suddenly grave; any trace of folksiness was gone when he spoke: “The Russians are looking at LSD-25 and many other drugs, Nate, and they have no scruples about how they go about their research. They have a concentrated program of brain-conditioning able to make men confess to crimes they never committed, and capable of changing American patriots into mouthpieces for Commie propaganda.”

“They're doing it, so we're doing it.”

His eyes were tight. “We can't allow the Reds to get ahead of us, Nate, on this crucial battlefield of the mind—just because they don't hesitate to use unwilling human guinea pigs and we're too soft to do the same. Russia has mind control, and so
we
have to have it—just like the Bomb.”

I shook my head, astounded. “So you align yourself with a twisted bastard like
Gottlieb
? I should have killed that son of a bitch when I had the chance.”

He smiled faintly. “Nate … you want to be John Wayne. You want to be Mike Hammer. You don't want to settle for sending the small fry to hell, you want the man at the top. You want him to look down the barrel of your .45.”