Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14 (11 page)

Frank—still wearing that silly Gable mustache—was seated at the makeup mirror in his tux pants and a T-shirt; he looked lean and fairly muscular, not quite as skinny as many thought him to be. He sat hunched over the counter, smoking a cigarette, with a glass of whiskey nearby. His face had a ravaged look—hard to believe that, not long ago, he’d been the idol of countless girls and women.

“I’m not going out there, Nate—I’m not doing it. Not as long as that fucking fag cocksucker is in the house. No way, man. No fucking way.”

Lee Mortimer had blasted Sinatra countless times in his columns. Frank claimed it was because the reporter had once tried, unsuccessfully, to sell the singer a song (“a piece of shit!”). Mortimer had had a heyday running the story about Sinatra accompanying Rocco and Joey Fischetti to Havana for the big confab with Lucky Luciano in ’47, attended by a rogues’ gallery of mobsters. As a celebrity who could travel unhindered, Frank had reportedly carried a bag filled with tribute, the greenback variety. Though Frank attended none of the business meetings, he hobnobbed with Luciano in the casino of the Hotel Nacional, and even had his picture taken with the deported ganglord.

A while back Sinatra had spotted Mortimer in Ciro’s, and attacked the reporter, who won an out-of-court settlement from Frank, when Louis B. Mayer forced him.

I pulled up a chair. “I got rid of Mortimer, Frank. He’s gone.”

Sinatra looked up, the famous blue eyes taking on a startled-deer aspect. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“How did you manage it?”

“I had to promise you’d blow him. I hope you don’t mind.”

He looked at me blankly, and then he burst out laughing. He laughed until he cried, and I laughed some, too.

Smiling, standing, he said, “You’re not kidding—he is gone?”

“I’m not kidding…”

Sinatra looked relieved.

“…you do have to blow him.”

Sinatra grinned, shook his head. “You fucker…. He’s gone?”

“Out at home plate. A ghost. A distant bad memory.”

As he got into his shirt and tie, Sinatra said, “You’re just the guy I wanna see, anyway.”

“Yeah?”

“What I said out in Hollywood, at Sherry’s—it still goes. I want to hire you. I can have a thousand-buck retainer for you at your office in the morning.”

“For what?”

“I want you to fly out to D.C. and talk to this son of a bitch.”

“Kefauver?”

“No! Fuck Kefauver. It’s McCarthy I’m sweating, man. If they label me a pinko, I really am washed up. You said you know the guy—through Pearson, right?”

“I know McCarthy. He’s a good joe to drink with.”

“Well, find out what it’ll take to get him off my ass. See if he wants money, or if he wants me to sing at a fundraiser or what the hell. But I got to put a stop to this shit. Mortimer’s starting to spread that pinko crap around, already. People thinking I maybe have some gangsters as friends is one thing—they think I’m a Commie, man, I’m dead. Capeesh?”

“Capeesh,” I said.

“How’s the tie look?”

“It looked better when Nancy was making ’em.”

“Don’t start with me. What are you my Jewish mother?”

“No, I’m your Irish rose. Get out there and try not to cough up blood.”

He smirked at me. “Sweet, Melvin—you’re a real sweetheart.”

Sinatra was great. The crowd loved him. His voice did seem to have a rasp tonight, a kind of burr in it, but it was attractive, somehow, more mature. His ballads were heartbreaking—during “I’m a Fool to Want You” Jackie began to cry—and he seemed to have a new energy in the up-tempo stuff, like a peppy version of “All of Me” and the swinging “Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week).” Maybe he did have some career left out in front of him.

By the time Frank got on stage, however, Rocco had noticed us—and he would, from time to time, shoot daggers toward Jackie and me. Charley seemed to be trying to settle him down, touching his brother’s hand, even sliding an arm around Rocco’s shoulder, whispering.

In the middle of “The Hucklebuck”—a terrible song, typical of what Columbia was sticking Sinatra with these days—I told Jackie I needed to step out to take a leak. She was aware, of course, that Rocco had been shooting us death rays, and claimed to have to go herself.

While she was in the ladies’ room, I was—and I’m sure this will come as no surprise—in the men’s room. This wouldn’t be worth noting, if—just after I zipped up—Rocco hadn’t come striding in.

The men’s room at the Chez Paree—this one, anyway (there were several)—was good-size; we had it to ourselves, Rocco and I, the show being in progress and all.

“Hi, Rocky,” I said, voice echoing in this cathedral of porcelain altars and Crane confessionals, and went over to the sink and began washing up.

His voice, like his footsteps, echoed, too: “What’s the idea, Nate?”

I let the water run, soaping my hands. “Oh, I always wash my hands after I piss or shit—you ought to try it, Rocky. Latest thing.”

Rocco—who looked spiffy in his tux, very handsome except for that horror-show pockmarked puss surrounded by skunk-streaked hair—didn’t smile. That business about me kidding him, that treating-him-like-a-regular-guy routine, wasn’t going to play.

His voice boomed hollowly: “You know what I’m talkin’ about, Heller—I’m talkin’ about you picking up my castoffs…. You gonna go through my garbage, too? See if there’s any sandwiches I didn’t fucking finish?”

Still washing up, I turned my head and said, “She’s not garbage, Rocky. She’s a nice kid. She’s still a nice kid, even after your beatings.”

More echoing footsteps—he was within arm’s reach of me, now. The close-set eyes under the black slashes of eyebrow were fixed on me like twin revolver barrels.

He grinned—a grin as terrible as he was. “Maybe you don’t know it yet, Heller—but that ‘nice kid’ is a goddamn ad—a fuckin’ jabber!”

He meant an addict who used a hypo.

I soaped my hands, a regular Lady Macbeth. “Rocky, you’re the one who turned her into a junkie. I’m the one who’s gonna help her.” I shot him another sideways glance. “I’m asking you as a friend, Rock—back off. She’s not your property, anymore.”

The black-slash eyebrows leapt up his forehead; his lip peeled back over white store-bought teeth. “Her ass will always be mine, you dumb fuck! All I gotta do is snap my fingers…” He snapped them. “…and she’ll come crawlin’ on her hands and knees, beggin’ for—”

I didn’t know whether he was going to say dope, or make some filthy sexual reference, but I didn’t care to hear it, in either case.

Which is why I threw a handful of soapy water in his wide-open eyes.

His hands came up to his face, like I’d splashed him with acid, not harmless sudsy water, and I swung a hard right (wet) hand into his balls.

His yowl of pain echoed as he folded up and went down, and now he was the one on the floor, crawling. While he was still helpless, I frisked him, found no firearms, and then I leaned over and hit him in the face—in the right eye, in his burning eye.

And then I slugged him in his other eye, his burning left. Two shiners for one seemed a fair exchange to me. Finally rage fueled him—and perhaps the stinging in his eyes abated— enough for him to rise up off the floor and come at me.

But I’d had plenty of time to get my nine millimeter out. He hadn’t seen me pull it, but he saw the gun now, and he froze— hands clawed before him, a werewolf in a tuxedo.

That was the tableau Charley Fischetti witnessed when he came in the John, looking for his brother, no doubt.

“No, Heller,” Charley said, approaching tentatively, hands up and out, sending a nonthreatening message. He too was in a tux, his dyed-blond hair combed perfectly back. His elevator shoes clip-clopped, echoing. “Don’t do it—let him go.”

I cocked the automatic; the click echoed, too, like another footstep.

“Doesn’t he know who he’s dealing with?” Rocky asked his brother, flabbergasted, astounded, frustrated by my actions. Then to me: “Don’t you fucking
know
who you’re
dealing
with?”

I smiled at him, but my gun hand was trembling—just a little. “You’re a tough man, Rock. A killer. I’d be impressed, only I killed more Japs in one afternoon than your goombah career total.”

Rocco was trembling, too—whether with fear or rage or both, I couldn’t say. At the same time, he seemed coiled to spring; and part of me welcomed that.

Charley stood next to us—had he moved forward two steps, he’d have been between us. “Come on, Heller—back off…. Rocky, back off…back off!” Charley swallowed, eyes flicking from me to his brother and back again. “I know what this is about—it’s that girl, isn’t it? That goddamn girl….”

“Her ass is mine!” Rocco snarled.

I backhanded the son of a bitch.

He couldn’t believe it. Rocco just stood there with his red eyes and touched the red in the corner of his mouth and couldn’t believe it.

“You touch her again, you come near her again,” I told him, “I will kill you so fucking slow you’ll be begging me to finish you. I’ll shoot your toes off and let you bleed to death out your fuckin’ feet.”

Rocco didn’t know what to say. The skunk-haired gangster looked afraid; it did not seem to be a state he was terribly familiar with. People were, after all, supposed to be afraid of him.

“Rocky,” Charley said, gently, “you put the girl out on the street with her bags—you sent her away. If Nate wants to take up with her, that’s his business.”

Rocco looked at Charley in amazement, searching his brother’s face for some sign that these were just words meant to fool me. If he found that, I didn’t sense it.

Charley turned my way, his voice gentle, reasonable. “Nate— can Rocky go now? Could you and I speak, alone, for a few moments—just the two of us?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Rock, did you need to use the facilities before you leave? Maybe you want to throw some water on your face.”

Rocco’s upper lip curled back, like a Doberman about to growl—or attack.

“Go, Rock,” Charley said, and he took his brother’s arm and tugged him away from where he’d stood facing me. “Go sit at the table and enjoy Frankie and stay away from our friend, Mr. Heller here…and stay away from the girl.”

Rocco swallowed, nodded, and hurried out.

Charley, breathing hard, leaned against the sink counter. “Nate…Nate, are you insane? Aren’t you fucking aware my brother is a very violent man?”

“I’ll take those questions in order: yes I am insane; that’s how I got out of the Marines. And your brother
is
a violent man—almost as violent as I am, and much tougher with women than I’ll ever be.”

Charley was shaking. He reached a hand in his tux pocket and found the small round silver box, from which he selected two pink pills. He popped them in his mouth, and ran a faucet and stuck his face under the water and drank. Then he used a paper towel to dry his face and turned to me, his hazel eyes tight with apparent earnestness.

“Nate…I will handle my brother. I will make sure this unfortunate incident is a…one time thing…. Just a sad falling out among old friends.”

“I’ll kill him if he touches her.”

“I know! I know…. You made your point. What Rocco fails to understand is how…misguided he was in evicting Miss Payne.”

“Why is that? He was tired of her—she was nothing to him but a dog to whip.”

Charley drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “This inquiry…with the potentially damaging publicity it could bring…. Miss Payne might feel sufficiently alienated from my brother to do something unwise.”

“You mean, she lived in your penthouse for a long time, and saw people come and go, and probably heard things.”

He nodded, once, a kind of a sideways nod. “Now. If I…
handle
Rocco. Keep him away from her—and from you…will you see to it that Miss Payne does not become friendly with the senator from Tennessee and his little tea party?”

I considered that. Then I said, “You know, that seems fair.”

He sighed and beamed. “Good. Good…. And thank you for helping my brother, my
other
brother out, with that Mortimer character.” He shook his head. “Such a lout. Such an uncouth lout.”

“Some people have poor social graces,” I said, holstering my nine millimeter.

Charley exited the men’s room, with me right behind him; no sign of Rocco. I think Charley was as relieved as I was. He turned to me and extended his hand.

“We have a deal, then?”

“Deal,” I said, shaking with him.

When Charley had headed back toward the showroom— where Sinatra was singing, “If I Loved You”—I glanced toward the ladies’ room door, and saw Jackie cracking it, peeking out.

“Come on, honey,” I said. “We’re missing the show.”

She rushed to my side, looped her arm in mine. “I saw Rocco come out! He didn’t see me, but I—”

“He’s not going to bother you, anymore.”

“What happened?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

And I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.

Washington, D.C.—the seat of political power in the western hemisphere—was also the hub of the mightiest industrial and military machine in the history of the world. The White House, the Capitol, various imposing monuments and a multitude of marble buildings swimming in seas of manicured green, were dignified symbols that imparted a stateliness, a nobility to the terrible powers certain men in this town possessed—men who charted the strategies and movements of armies and navies all over the world, who dispatched diplomats and spies to every corner of the earth, who controlled the man-made cataclysm of the atomic bomb.

I had come to our nation’s capital to see two men who wielded power of a different sort—the power of information…or sometimes misinformation. A few well-placed words—truth or fabrication, it didn’t seem to matter much which—could destroy lives as surely as any bullet or bomb…and without the mess.

One of those powerful men resided in a townhouse on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown, a quaint neighborhood of cobblestone streets, reconditioned slave quarters, and Early American shutters. This was a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, and the well-shaded lane was alive with fall colors—coppers and yellows and oranges and reds (not the card-carrying variety).

I’d flown in this morning, arriving at the National Airport, on the Virginia side; from my window seat, as we glided over the city, the pilot executing a tourist-pleasing swoop, I’d taken in the grand obelisk of the Washington Monument and the familiar Capitol dome, dominating a distinctive skyline they and other monuments formed, no skyscrapers to compete with—buildings over 110 feet were banned by law, locally.

I had spent a lot of time in D.C. over the years—particularly on various jobs I’d done for the late James Forrestal, our nation’s first secretary of defense—and was quite used to Washington’s old-fashioned Southern sensibilities, its spacious avenues, tree-shaded lawns, the landscaped green (some of it dyed to stay that way year-round). What the hell—green seemed to symbolize the power in this city even better than stately marble.

At the townhouse in Georgetown, I trotted up the half-dozen steps to the landing and used the polished brass knocker. The golden-tressed young woman who answered smiled in recognition.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, playfully, because in other circumstances she had called me Nate, “you are expected.”

She had a perfectly delightful middle-European accent.

“Hi, Anya,” I said, stepping at her invitation into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the townhouse. “You look swell.”

“You look good, also.”

Anya was a Yugoslavian war refugee in her early twenties, with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. She wore a businesslike blue dress with white trim and a white belt, an ensemble that played down her bosomy shape. We’d had a brief fling a while back, but her boss didn’t know it—because he was in the midst of a longer fling with his “secretary,” himself.

Anya was the office’s current “fair-haired girl,” as the staffers around here dubbed them, “cutie-pies” in her employer’s own terminology. Since her English was limited, her secretarial duties ran not to taking dictation but accompanying her married boss to cocktail parties and out-of-town speaking engagements.

A living room loomed straight ahead, with a formal dining room off to my left; but this was not a social call—the lady of the house, Luvie, spent most of her time at the family farm, anyway. Anya led me down the right a few steps, into the office area, ushering me—wordlessly—into a book-, paper-, and memento-flung study where her boss sat typing furiously at a stand to one side of his big wide wooden desk. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, fingers flying, the tall, bald, sturdy-looking journalist seemed oblivious to our entrance.

Beyond an open double doorway opposite the desk, a larger office area hummed with activity, a file cabinet-lined bullpen with three women and two men, typing, talking on the phone, interacting. Anya smiled and nodded to me, as she went out and joined them, shutting the doors behind her, though I could see her through the panes of glass, positioning herself at the wire service ticker, watching stories come in, doing her best to read them.

Sunday was one of Drew Pearson’s deadline days—he had his weekly radio broadcast tonight and he and his staff were prepping frantically for it. (One key figure around here, legman Jack Anderson, was not present: a Mormon, he didn’t work on Sundays, though he toiled his ass off on Saturday.) About twenty years ago, Pearson had gone from being a journeyman Washington newsman to a national figure by appropriating the technique of Manhattan and Hollywood gossip columnists for his “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

That syndicated column—growing out of a book not unlike the
Confidential
series by Mortimer and Lait—was an immediate smash, and Pearson was soon America’s preeminent crusader for liberal causes. From time to time I had done background investigations for him, particularly those involving Chicago or California; but we had a rocky relationship—he was a cheap bastard, slow to pay his bills, plus he had an ends-justifies-the-means approach that troubled even a cynical Chicago heel like myself.

Speaking of Chicago heels, I stood rocking on mine, my hands in my suitpants pockets, waiting for Pearson to come up for air and notice my existence. This study had dark plaster walls decorated with photos of Pearson with show business figures (Sinatra among them) and national political luminaries, including a couple presidents and Senator Estes Kefauver; a few political cartoons, lampooning Pearson and his sometimes controversial stands, were framed and hanging here and there, as well. I was thinking about what an egomaniac this guy was until I realized these reminded me of my own office walls.

This was homier than my Monadnock suite, however, cozier—snapshots lined the mantelpiece of a working fireplace, and windowsills were stacked with books and magazines and one sill was occupied by a slumbering black cat. A primitive rural landscape and an oil painting of Pearson’s late father— neither very good—shared wall space with the framed photos and political cartoons.

Pearson stopped typing, heaved a sigh, and flipped the fresh page of copy on a desk lined with paper-filled wooden intake boxes. He had still not acknowledged my presence. He glided over, backward, on his swivel chair and got behind the desk, and turned to me, finally bestowing that foxy grin I knew so well.

“Must you always come by on broadcast day?” he asked, standing to his full six three, extending his hand. Just as he typed rat-a-tat-tat style, he talked the same way, having trained himself to sound like an elitist version of Walter Winchell, for the radio version of “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

Reaching across his messy desk to shake with him, I said, “Remind me—what
is
your slow day around here?”

The bustle of the bullpen provided background music.

“No such animal, as you well know.” He gestured for me to sit and I took a hard wooden chair across from him.

Pearson settled back in his chair. He had an egg-shaped head, close-set eyes, a prominent nose, and a wide mouth adorned with a well-waxed, pointy-tipped mustache. Under the purple smoking jacket, a white shirt and brown-and-yellow bow tie peeked out. Gentlemanly, aloof, he would have made a fine British butler.

“Thanks for making time for me,” I said.

His arms were folded; he was rocking gently in the swivel chair. Then he halted in midrock and he reached for a jar of Oreo cookies on the desk, took off the glass lid, and dug himself a couple out; then he told me to help myself.

I passed. This—and cheating on his wife, and not paying me promptly—was his only vice. He was a Quaker and did not smoke, though he took hard liquor, albeit not to excess. He also did not pepper his speech with “thee” and “thou,” which would have been a little hard to take, considering his superior manner.

“I understand you’re not cooperating with my friend Estes,” he said.

Suddenly I felt as if I’d been summoned by Pearson, even though it had been me who arranged the appointment.

“I haven’t even met Senator Kefauver yet,” I said. “But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Drew, that I don’t intend to compromise the privacy of my clients.”

An eyebrow arched. “You won’t testify?”

“If the committee calls me, I will, sure. But they won’t learn anything except name, rank, and serial number. If you could pass that info along to your ‘friend’ Estes, that would be swell.”

“Your visit does have something to do with the Crime Committee, though,” he said.

On the phone, I had indicated as much, if vaguely. Arguably, I could have handled this—and the other conversation I’d come to D.C. for—over the long-distance wire; but Pearson was one of the most paranoid men in a paranoid town, and refused to talk frankly on the telephone. He had his office swept for bugs on a weekly basis, and made most of his own calls from pay phones.

I said, “Yes—I would appreciate your insights on a couple of matters related to Kefauver.”

His response was to bite into an Oreo. Seeing the chunk of cookie disappear into that prissily mustached mouth was amusing, but I kept a straight face.

“I spoke to Lee Mortimer the other night,” I said.

“Mortimer.” He shook his head disgustedly, chewing his cookie. “What a pathetic little creature.”

“Lee claims he’s been shut out of the Crime Committee’s inside circle. Apparently he deluded himself into thinking they’d take him, a reporter, on as a paid, government investigator…just because he was the guy who inspired Kefauver to look into—”

But I never finished that thought, because Pearson lurched forward, and anger glistened in his close-set eyes. “Mortimer is a self-aggrandizing liar. I am the one who got Estes interested in organized crime—how many exposes have I written over the years, anyway? Louisiana, New York, Chicago…. Damn it, Nathan—you contributed your investigative prowess to a number of them.”

“I guess I hadn’t made that connection.”

He made a sweeping gesture. “Isn’t it enough that Mortimer and his fat friend Lait plagiarized my approach in their trashy
Confidential
books? Must this iguana now lay claim to my efforts to help launch the Crime Investigating Committee?”

I knew Pearson was a booster of Kefauver’s, and the columnist had even been talking up the Tennessee senator as a possible presidential candidate. But I didn’t realize Pearson was—or anyway thought he was—a prime mover behind the mob inquiry.

Pearson was saying, “Hell, I was delighted when Estes introduced his resolution to investigate the rackets on a national scale. But then it got stalled in the Senate for lack of support—until
I
put the pressure on.”

“Who was trying to block it?”

“McCarran, for one—though technically McCarran is Kefauver’s boss, you know.”

Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, home of Las Vegas, was—no shock here—in the mob’s pocket. McCarran was a Democrat who voted like a conservative Republican, one of the rabid anti-Commie crowd.

I was confused. “How in hell can McCarran be Kefauver’s boss, particularly when he tried to stop the investigation before it even started?”

Pearson shrugged, smiled his insider’s smile. “Kefauver’s committee ultimately reports to the Judiciary Committee, of which McCarran is chairman.”

“Christ.”

Pearson shifted in his seat. “And of course without the support of the Senate majority leader—Lucas, of your home state—Estes could never have launched his probe, in the first place. And initially Lucas was dead set against it.”

Pearson was referring to Scott Lucas, currently campaigning against Everett Dirksen.

“So I simply spoke to my good friend Scott,” Pearson continued, “and reminded him of certain rumors that he’d received big campaign contributions from Chicago gamblers. Pointed out that it would look very bad, if he continued to block the Kefauver investigation…and he graciously granted his support—Mortimer my ass! He’s a hack, a conniving hack.”

“What about these accusations he’s making about Halley?”

“Jack’s investigated Halley thoroughly…” Pearson meant Jack Anderson. “…and the man is a straight arrow. A partner in Halley’s law firm did indeed represent the railroad in question, the Hudson & Manhattan line, the one with the supposed gangster investors—a relationship that ended some time ago. Halley had no contact himself, and he’s been a dogged investigator, a relentless inquisitor in the hearings thus far.”

“What about his so-called Hollywood connections?”

“Nothing of substance there, either. His firm represents a distillery whose publicist has a few Hollywood clients. Typical Mortimer and Lait yellow journalism.”

Drew Pearson complaining about yellow journalism was like an infected mosquito bitching about yellow fever.

“Drew, do you have influence with Estes?”

Tiny shrug, twitch of the mustache. “Certainly.”

I nodded toward a certain photo on the wall. “Can you ask your friend from Tennessee to steer clear of our mutual friend Frankie?”

His eyes narrowed. “That might be difficult. An inquiry has to go wherever the truth leads.”

“Bullshit. Drew, this investigation has all sorts of political strings, and you damn well know it. Look at the emphasis on gambling—I don’t see the mob’s influence on big-city machine politics coming under the microscope.”

A more elaborate shrug. “…I can try.”

I leaned forward. “Certainly you can understand it would be devastating to Frank’s career right now, if he were called in front of TV cameras to testify about gangsters he met on his summer vacation.”

Nodding slowly, Pearson said, “Yes. I can understand that…. I can but try.”

“Thank you. I’ll let him know—he’s under a hell of a lot of pressure. You see, Frank’s also got a problem with another Senate inquiry…courtesy of a certain old pal of ours.”

Pearson knew at once who I was talking about. “I can well imagine. Frank has a good heart—and he believes in the right causes. That’s enough to make him a ‘pinko’ in some circles. I can well imagine that ‘Tailgunner Joe’ might relish lining the Voice up in his capricious sights.”