“I need a lawyer.”
“I plead guilty to being a lawyer,” Cockran said, “but mostly I teach at Columbia’s law school and I take on an occasional case in international law. That, plus my writing, keeps me pretty busy.”
“A writer? What do you write?” Ingrid asked.
“Books and articles on politics. But now mostly books,” Cockran replied. “Biographies.”
“Really?” Ingrid began and then her eyes lit up. “Wait. You mean you’re W.B. Cockran, the one who wrote A Life In The Saddle about Teddy Roosevelt? I love that book. It made him seem both human and heroic at the same time.”
Cockran smiled and modestly dipped his head. “Guilty. And you’re right. Colonel Roosevelt was very human and he would be the first to admit his flaws. But, deep down, he was proud of his heroism as well. I knew him when I was a boy. His place was just up the coast from ours. His sons were my playmates. I called him ‘Uncle Teddy’.”
Ingrid shook her head and smiled. It was a beautiful smile. “W.B. Cockran. Bourke Cockran. I should have connected them but somehow I didn’t. You were so fierce last summer in defending that poor woman, Judy Dill. It never occurred to me that someone like that could write something as sensitive as your biography of Roosevelt.”
Cockran shrugged and gave her a crooked grin. “Well, what can I say? I guess I’m a fierce, sensitive kind of guy. And I’ll need to be for the book I’m writing now. It’s a biography of my father and the great men whose lives he touched. Grover Cleveland. Theodore Roosevelt. Winston Churchill. The last two will be a real challenge. They only met once but for reasons I’ve yet to discover, TR could not stand Winston. Too much alike, I guess.”
Ingrid laughed and her face lit up. She really was beautiful.
“But I need someone tough for a lawyer. Someone who’s not afraid of my husband and his wealth.”
“I don’t know about tough. But I’m not afraid of your husband.”
“Good. I know he doesn’t like you and I sense that there’s more to it than your defending those poor women facing sterilization. But Wesley won’t talk about it.”
Cockran didn’t reply. Well, he thought, she was right. There was more to it. Wesley Waterman didn’t like him and had reminded him of that only moments ago. Cockran knew why. He really had made the takeover of his client’s company last year in Germany far more expensive than Waterman had intended. Apparently he didn’t appreciate that if Cockran’s opponent wasn’t playing by the rules, he didn’t either.
“So, may I have an appointment?”
“Give me some idea what your problem is, Ingrid. My practice is fairly specialized,” Cockran replied. “International trade and finance.”
“But when I met you last year, you were arguing a sterilization appeal. I also saw you in trial last month. Another sterilization case.”
Cockran nodded. “My fourth. And I lost them all. I don’t know why you need a lawyer, but you might be better off with someone who actually wins a case now and then.”
Ingrid placed her hand on Cockran’s elbow and guided him over to a window.
“I am going to divorce my husband and he is not going to be pleased. I was carefully selected to be Mrs. Waterman Number Two after he committed his first wife to an asylum and then divorced her. He really believes all that breeding theory nonsense and he expects us to have perfect children. He plans to raise them as ‘international citizens.’ Earlier this year, he bought a large schloss in Bavaria where he expects me to spend six months of the year. That was the final straw. I am not leaving this country,” she said, “and I will never bear him children.”
Cockran turned from the window to Ingrid. Apparently she was unaware her husband already knew of her plans. “I’ve never handled a divorce in my life, and I don’t know a thing about it,” Cockran said and then noticed a slight frown cross her face. “But I’m sure there are lawyers in my firm who do. Tomorrow morning. 9:00 a.m. sharp. The Chrysler Building. OK?”
The frown was still there. “But I want you personally, Bourke, not someone else.”
“Don’t worry. I may need help but if I take your case, I’ll handle it myself.”
“Thank you,” she said and squeezed his arm.
“Where the hell have you been?” Wesley Waterman boomed, startling Cockran and Ingrid as he laid a heavy hand on his wife’s shoulder. Cockran could see her wince. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m leaving now. The Whartons’ dinner party starts at nine o’clock and you know how Millicent absolutely hates it when people are late. Let’s go,” he said with a peremptory nod of his head toward the door.
Ingrid coolly looked down at her husband’s hand as if an unwanted insect had lighted there until, at last, he withdrew it. “I’ll meet you there, Wesley. Mr. Cockran and I have several friends in common and much to catch up on. I may be late. Give my apologies to Millie if I am.”
Waterman started to object but Cockran looked him straight in the eye and extended his arm to Ingrid who hooked her arm through his. He looked down at Ingrid and then gave Waterman a big smile as he walked off with the businessman’s beautiful wife, leaving behind one unhappy and humiliated husband. It felt great. Just like old times on the Gold Coast.
Ingrid turned her head to him and said, in a loud voice for the benefit of those nearby, “The Russian Tea Room? Of course, Bourke, I would absolutely love that. I prefer vodka with my caviar rather than champagne, don’t you?” she said, squeezing his arm with her free hand and snuggling close.
Cockran looked at her and tried to conceal the surprise in his eyes. He had said nothing about the Russian Tea Room. Or caviar. Outside, Cockran turned to her. “What was that all about?”
“You have not yet outlived your reputation, Bourke. When I confided in two of my best girlfriends that I was contemplating retaining you in divorce proceedings, simply the mention of your name caused them to think we were having an affair. So I thought … what if we were seen together publicly in front of Wesley’s friends, arm in arm, having a cocktail, chatting like old friends and then going off to a rendezvous at the Russian Tea Room? Isn’t that wicked? Wouldn’t that rub my husband’s face in it?”
“Well.…” Cockran began, “is that entirely wise?”
Ingrid laughed. “It’s just payback for my husband’s bimbos, Bourke. As I’ll show you tomorrow, I have ample grounds for divorce apart from that. Now, let’s leave. I really do love vodka with my caviar and I intend to spend the rest of the evening with you celebrating the beginning of the end of my unfortunate marriage.”
7.
Some Dinner Dates, Nothing Serious
Long Island, New York
Monday, 9 May 1932
MATTIE pulled the robe tighter and took another sip of scotch. There were only three people whom both Cockran and Mattie had known prior to their being introduced in the summer of 1929. One, of course, was Winston, Mattie’s godfather and someone Cockran had known since he was five years old. Another was Cockran’s childhood friend, Anne Darrow, at whose cocktail party they first met.
Unfortunately and, to Mattie’s chagrin, the third person whom both she and Cockran knew was Ted Hudson. They had served together in military intelligence in various capacities during and after the war and, for whatever reason, Cockran thoroughly despised Ted.
Cockran had never volunteered why but when he learned that Mattie had once dated Ted, he was not happy. In fact, that was when Mattie first learned her new lover could be a jealous man. She made a mental note at the time never to raise Ted’s name in Cockran’s presence and she hadn’t.
“I met him in 1924,” she had told Cockran. “We would occasionally run across each other in our travels. The last time was in Paris, the spring of ’29, a few months before we met. He was back in military intelligence then and he told me he was leaving the army and asked me to get him an interview with Hearst. We had dinner a few times and went dancing. That was it. It’s not as though we were seriously seeing each other.” Or, Mattie had though
t at the time but had left unspoken, that Hudson once proposed to her and she had turned him down.
What she selectively had told Cockran, however, was all literally true. As for “seriously” seeing each other, that depended on how you defined seriously. When she was younger, Mattie had been to bed with a few men she met by happenstance during the course of an assignment, relationships which ended with the assignment. She thought of them as “aventures”. Some were intense. None were serious. At least to her. Had Ted been one of her little aventures? That was a different question, one Cockran hadn’t asked and she had no intention of ever answering. Cockran had his own past—with married women, no less, if you believed Anne Darrow—and Mattie had never asked about them. Well, girls were entitled to their secrets too.
Still she knew there was no way Cockran was going to be happy about her traveling on an assignment alone with Theodore Stanhope Hudson IV. “Chief, it really looks like a great story but I think I’m going to have to pass on this one.”
Mattie winced internally when she saw the disappointment on Hearst’s long face.
“Why is that, my dear? You’ve never turned me down before.”
“It’s not the story, Chief. True, I’ve only been back a week from Bolivia and I could use some more time off. It’s just… well, it’s Ted Hudson.”
“You have a problem with him?” Hearst asked. “I thought you two once had been…“
“Romantically involved?” Mattie said, completing his sentence. “Yes, you might say that, in a casual sort of way. Some dinner dates, nothing serious. And, as you know, I stopped seeing him after you hired him.”
“That wasn’t necessary, not for me.” Hearst said. “Ted wasn’t happy about that?”
“No, Ted wasn’t happy, but that’s not my problem. Cockran is my problem. He and Ted were MID agents together. The fact Ted and I once dated really rubs him the wrong way.”
“I’m sorry if this poses a problem but this is an unusual story and it requires two reporters. My best reporters. You’re one. Ted is the other…”
“Maybe, but he’s not as good as me.”
“No one is. But there may be a European connection. I asked him about it because he’s our European bureau chief and he volunteered to return to the States to cover the story. I had already decided it was your story. It still is but Ted may be a big help. Please say you’ll do it.”
Mattie sighed. Disappoint her boyfriend? Or her boss? A helluva choice. She paused but she knew what she was going to do. She had always known. Saying no to Hearst would be like saying no to her father. She just couldn’t do it. No matter how much she loved Cockran, she couldn’t disappoint the Chief. Besides, this was one of Winston’s ideas. That made it twice as difficult to turn down.
“Okay, chief. I’m your girl. But you owe me one for this. Big time.”
Hearst beamed. “Certainly, my dear. If you want, I’ll speak to your Mr. Cockran.”
Mattie smiled. “Thanks, Chief but that won’t be necessary. I’ll do it myself.”
Mattie phoned Cockran’s Fifth Avenue townhouse but, after ten rings, Mattie placed the receiver down and looked at her wrist watch. 12:15 a.m. The lecture had been over at 8:30 p.m. Where was Cockran? She looked out the window. The thunderstorm had passed and the night sky was clear, a full moon illuminating the autogiro tied down fifty yards away. Mattie was tempted to fly back to Manhattan but she decided not to. No need to press her luck.
“Chief, could I persuade you to have your chauffeur give me a lift back to Manhattan? I’ll send someone for the autogiro in the morning.” She’d soften Cockran up tonight and then she would find just the right time tomorrow to tell him about Ted. Men were so predictable. Bourke was no different.
8.
Stay Away From Other Men’s Wives
Fifth Avenue
New York City
Tuesday, 10 May 1932
COCKRAN sent Ingrid home in a taxi after midnight when she made clear to him that she had no intention of joining her husband at the Wharton’s dinner party. He then walked east on 57th toward Fifth Avenue and his townhouse in the sixties. Cockran had literally never handled a divorce case in his life. Notwithstanding his having lost four sterilization cases in the last three years—all bench trials—Cockran thought he was a fairly decent trial lawyer when the occasion arose. For some reason, juries liked him and trusted him which was, in his experience, half the battle. That much he knew he owed to his father, either to his genes or the example he set for his son. Maybe a little of both.
Still, much as Cockran enjoyed a good courtroom fight, he wouldn’t have taken Ingrid’s case were she not the wife of Wesley Waterman. Waterman wasn’t the one directly responsible for the tragic death of Cockran’s young blonde client the summer before, but Cockran still had a score to settle with Waterman and this was the first opportunity he had been given to do so. He hoped that Donovan & Raichle, the law firm where he was “Of Counsel”, had a divorce expert.
Later, Cockran reflected that he had been too focused on the thought of settling the score with Waterman and not enough on the fact that his public humiliation by his wife in rejecting a dinner party with him in favor of a cozy evening at the Russian Tea Room with Cockran had given Waterman ample grounds for a pre-emptive strike.
They had been waiting for Cockran in the shadows beside his Fifth Avenue townhouse. Both of them were big, with thick necks and blond, closely cropped bullet-shaped heads. Each man outweighed him by a good forty pounds. One grabbed him from behind and pinned his arms. The other, the one with a mustache, was set to use Cockran’s stomach as a punching bag.
“We’ve come to give you a message, Cockran,” he said with an odd, difficult to place accent as he drove his fist deep into Cockran’s midsection.
Great, Cockran thought, trying to recover his wind. Just what he needed. These guys looked like overweight Katzenjammer Kids. They were probably named Hans and Fritz. Still something about them seemed familiar but Cockran had a terrible memory for names.
“Stay away from other men’s wives,” the man holding him said as Fritz the mustache once more hit Cockran a heavy blow in the stomach, again driving the breath from him.
Their advice was wise but not well-intentioned and Cockran swung his right foot in a wide arc as Fritz began to deliver another punch. His shoe hit the side of Fritz’s left knee and the man cried out in pain as the knee buckled under the impact and he crumpled to the ground.
Hans momentarily loosened his grip on Cockran’s arms, unsure of how to help his fallen comrade. Cockran rammed his right elbow into Hans’ gut, causing him to drop his arms. That was all Cockran needed. He spun around, grabbed Hans by his lapels and smashed his forehead down squarely on the bridge of the thug’s nose. He heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage as he did so. Hans howled in pain, bringing his hands to his nose. Cockran came even with the man on his right side and leg-whipped him, knocking his legs out from under him. As he fell heavily to the ground, Cockran knelt down, grabbed the man’s right elbow with his left hand and his wrist with his right. Using the elbow as a fulcrum, he bent the man’s wrist back in an unnatural position until he finally heard it snap and the man howled with the pain of a broken right wrist.
Fritz had regained his feet by now and limped only a little as he threw a roundhouse right at Cockran’s head. Cockran dodged the punch and hit him with a left jab. Fritz raised his hands to defend his face and Cockran hit him in his ample belly, knocking the wind out of him. An upper cut drove him back until he stumbled over a still prostrate Hans and fell to the ground. Cockran was on top of him in an instant and a moment later Fritz had suffered the same fate as Hans, Cockran using the man’s own left elbow as a fulcrum to break his left wrist, the audible snap of bone nearly drowned out by the other man’s cries.
How to incapacitate an enemy within ten seconds had been one of the more useful skills Cockran had acquired in the exacting training course given to Army MID agents assigned to the Inquiry, the secret agency c
reated during the war by Woodrow Wilson. His old MID hand-to –hand combat instructor would have been proud of the head butt especially.
And then it hit him. MID! It had been well over ten years ago but these guys had been in several classes with him at the Army War College for a few weeks in the summer of 1920. They hadn’t gone through MID training together but their size and mid-western accents made them stand out in class. Wisconsin? No. Minnesota? Yes, that was it. At times, their accents almost sounded Canadian. Minnesota and MID agents both. But now, he amended, probably ex-MID agents. He still couldn’t remember their names but he had friends in MID who might. As he recalled, they weren’t bad guys and, on occasion, they had beers together after class. Strange to think they were now just hired muscle for Wesley Waterman.
Cockran looked around. Where the hell was a cop when you really needed one? He watched the two men rise unsteadily to their feet and, clutching their ruined wrists, walk down the street. He watched from inside the door until they turned the corner and were out of sight. Inside, the phone was ringing, but by the time he picked up the receiver, the caller had hung up.
BOURKE Cockran was woken from a sound sleep by the familiar pressure provided by the erect nipples of two very naked breasts pushed firmly against his back, followed by the rest of her body up against his backside. God, he loved the fact that Mattie always slept in the nude.
“No more, Ingrid. Please. You’re insatiable. You’ve worn me out. Ow! That hurt,” Cockran cried out as he felt the force of Mattie’s punch to his kidneys.
“It was supposed to hurt. Where have you been? I called at 12:15.”
Cockran rolled over and faced Mattie. “It’s a long story, but Ingrid is now my client. I can’t tell you what we discussed. But it’s serious. Her husband warned me not to represent her and sent two thugs over later to reinforce the message. I was probably busy with them when you called. What time is it, anyway? I thought you were going to spend the night at The Cedars.”
The Gemini Agenda Page 5