“Two-thirty in the morning. Once I couldn’t reach you, I decided to drive back here.”
“Why?”
“To spend the rest of the night with the man I love. What else?”
“What else indeed,” Cockran replied as he reached out for her. “But I’ll bet that also means you have a new assignment from Hearst, one on which you’ll be leaving soon.”
“I do. So, come on sailor, you’re wasting time here.”
9.
My Husband Is a Very Big Man
New York City
Tuesday, 10 May 1932
IT was a beautiful spring morning and Cockran was a happy man. Mattie’s new assignment—on a tip from Winston, no less—would keep her safely in the U.S. and away from war zones while he had a chance to stick it to Wesley Waterman. Life was good.
Cockran had decided to walk the twenty blocks or so from his townhouse to the Chrysler Building and the law offices of Donovan & Raichle. He met Ingrid Waterman inside the law firm’s walnut paneled reception area whose dominant features were brass lamps, old oil paintings, comfortable leather club chairs and tasteful oriental rugs selected by the senior partner’s wife, Ruth Donovan, herself. Ingrid was wearing dark glasses, oversized, like a film star. He was mildly surprised that she did not remove them as they walked down the corridor to his office, which faced south toward the tip of the island and the canyons of lower Manhattan. He noticed that, unlike last night, she was wearing no makeup. As he had noted when they first met, she didn’t really need it.
Cockran’s desk faced away from the window. He and Ingrid moved toward two green leather armchairs placed against the far wall, near a small table on which was a yellow and green Tiffany lamp. They placed their coffee cups on the table and sat down, the morning sun glowing over the skyscrapers. Ingrid did not remove her glasses.
Cockran briefly contemplated telling her about the assault last night, but decided not to. Cockran didn’t believe in coincidence. He couldn’t prove Waterman had hired the goons but the chances were remote that some other jealous husband from Cockran’s romantic past was responsible. More importantly, he found the men’s MID background was troubling.
“Thank you again, Bourke, for agreeing to see me this morning,” Ingrid said as she took a sip of coffee and removed her dark glasses.
Cockran gasped. One eye had been blackened and there was an ugly red bruise on her right cheek which the glasses had hidden.
“Would you be so kind as to close the door?” Ingrid asked.
Cockran walked over to the door and closed it. He turned back toward Ingrid and did a double-take. She had been dressed in a dove grey suit and cream colored blouse. Ingrid was standing, now wearing only her skirt and a lacy, low cut brassiere, her blouse draped over the arm of the chair. But it was not her breasts which grabbed Cockran’s attention. Rather, it was the ugly bruises on her shoulders and abdomen.
Wordlessly, she turned and offered a view of her back, which was criss-crossed with vivid red welts as if she had been beaten with a leather strap. Before Cockran could speak, she lifted the back of her skirt above the top of her silk stockings to the edge of her garter belt and the silk panties beneath, revealing more red welts on her thighs.
It took a second for a startled Cockran to find his voice. “Stop, Ingrid. That’s not necessary. I get the picture.”
Ingrid lowered her skirt, turned around and without a trace of embarrassment put her long-sleeve blouse back on, tucked it into her skirt and sat down.
“He did this?”
Ingrid nodded. “The black eye is a week old. That’s when I decided to contact you. Last night when I returned, he ripped my favorite gown right off and beat me with a belt again.”
“We can have him arrested for assault and battery.”
“I don’t want arrested, I want a divorce. I don’t want this all over the papers. I want out.”
“But why does he beat you?” Cockran said.
“I want children someday, but not by him. I’ve always taken precautions to see that I won’t conceive. We’ve been married three years. During that time, he’s had me examined by the most expensive specialists in the world. They tell me I’m quite fertile and they don’t know why I can’t conceive. Wesley, of course, is too proud to be examined by specialists himself because superior stock like him are potent by definition. But since he won’t be examined, I’ve made it clear that I consider him to be the problem, and I always point out that he had no children by his first wife either.”
“So that’s why he beats you?”
“No, he recently found my diaphragm, quite by accident when searching through my drawers for a lost pair of cuff links. Or so he said. I tried falsely confessing to an affair and told him the diaphragm was only for that. Given his assorted mistresses, I told him turnabout was fair play. He didn’t think so and that’s when he beat me the first time. I was so furious that I finally told him the truth. The diaphragm was to prevent my conceiving his child.”
“You mentioned that you ‘falsely’ confessed to having an affair. I take it you haven’t had any affairs?”
“Affairs?” Ingrid asked and then turned her head and looked out the window at the Manhattan skyline. “No, none. I’m certainly ready for an affair but things just never seem to work out for me. Timing is everything and my luck has been lousy.”
Cockran walked over to his desk, picked up the phone and dialed an interoffice number. “Sarah, I’m with the client I spoke to you about. It seems her husband has been beating her. Do you have a female photographer we could send her to this morning to document her bruises? You do? Fine, give me her name and address and make an appointment for her.”
Cockran wrote down the name and address and gave it to Ingrid. “Go right over. I want full body photos, long view and close-ups of all your bruises. The lawyer in the firm who will be helping me is a woman and the two of us are the only ones, for now, who will see the photos.” Cockran paused. “Actually, I may have to show them to one other person. Our managing partner. Our firm doesn’t specialize in divorce, although we do it to accommodate good clients. The managing partner needs to approve the case.”
Ingrid frowned. “Is that really necessary?
“Maybe the photographs might not be necessary, but.…”
“I don’t care about that. I want to know if he has your courage. Or will he be intimidated by my husband or his wealth?”
Cockran laughed. “He won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Trust me. His nickname is ‘Wild Bill.’ He fears no one. I’ll call you after I’ve talked with him.”
COCKRAN hung up the phone after his conversation with Major Timothy O’Hanlon in Washington. Tim was an old friend who had been in the same MID training class with him and had stayed on in the peacetime army. He had been in the War College classes with Cockran in 1920. He gave Tim a description of the two MID thugs and O’Hanlon had quickly identified them as the Schmidt brothers, Peter and Wilhem.
“Check them out,” Cockran said. “See if you can find what they’re doing now.”
“I seem to recall hearing some scuttlebutt that they had left MID and gone private. I’ll have their files pulled and then I’ll ask around and get back to you,” O’Hanlon said.
10.
Wild Bill Donovan
The Chrysler Building
New York City
Tuesday, 10 May 1932
COCKRAN shook hands with William B. Donovan, the managing partner of Donovan & Raichle. They had known each other since Cockran’s tenth birthday party when Donovan, Columbia University’s quarterback and a friend of his father, had been the guest of honor. Donovan was a big man, a few inches shy of Cockran, with a broad frame, expensively barbered brown hair, and a perpetual smile on an Irish face marked by sparklingly clear blue eyes.
During the war, Donovan had been a colonel and commanded New York’s 69th Regiment, the “Fighting 69th.” Cockran, then a captain, had been Donovan’s chief intelligence officer but a leg injury from a
shell fragment during the Battle of the Ourcq River after only five months in the trenches had sent Cockran back to the states for a long rehabilitation and an eventual assignment from MID to the Inquiry.
After the war, Donovan rose to be head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department in the Coolidge administration. In the waning months of Silent Cal’s second term of office, Donovan had become acting Attorney General. Donovan declined Herbert Hoover’s offer to be his running mate in 1928 and served instead as his campaign manager with a promise to be Hoover’s Attorney General. Elected in a landslide, Hoover promptly reneged on his promise to Donovan. Anti-Catholic feelings against the Democratic candidate Al Smith were so strong among Hoover supporters that the multimillionaire engineer didn’t think it politic to appoint even a Republican Irish Catholic to his otherwise all-white, male and Protestant cabinet.
Donovan then had formed what he termed an international law firm for American business with offices both in New York and Washington. He had invited Cockran, a tenured professor at Columbia’s law school, to join the firm as “of counsel,” which meant that Cockran took on his own cases or assignments from Donovan on an ad hoc basis. Joining Donovan’s firm also was one of the two events which brought him out of the introspective shell he had created for himself after his wife’s tragic murder where he had focused only on writing, teaching, and raising their son. The second was meeting Mattie McGary which felicitously had occurred at the same Anne Darrow cocktail party where Donovan extended the invitation to join his firm.
“I haven’t seen you in a month. Bourke. How is Mattie? Have you proposed to that girl yet? You know she’s far better than your….”
Cockran laughed. “Than my sorry Irish arse deserves? You’re beginning to sound like Bobby Sullivan.”
Donovan frowned. “Ah yes. Your Irish gangster friend.”
“He’s not a gangster, Bill. He’s a private detective licensed by the state of New York.”
“That he is but the two terms are not mutually exclusive. So, what can I do for you?”
“I need you to sign off on that new divorce client. I left a message about her with your secretary this morning.”
Donovan nodded. “Right. Mrs. Wesley Waterman. You talked with Sarah Steinberg as I suggested?” Donovan asked.
“I did. She’s young, but she really appears to know her stuff.”
“That she does. Our only lawyer of the fairer sex. So tell me about Mrs. Waterman. What are the grounds for divorce?”
Cockran didn’t reply. Instead, he reached into the file folder and pulled out a manila envelope containing the photographs of Ingrid Waterman which were delivered to Sarah Steinberg thirty minutes earlier. He silently slid the envelope across Donovan’s broad desk.
Donovan undid the metal clasp on the envelope and pulled out 8” by 10” glossy photographs and slowly went through them, one at a time, his frown deepening as he viewed each photograph, turned it face down and went on to the next. When he finished, he put the photographs back in the envelope, refastened the metal clasp and slid the envelope back across his desk to Cockran.
“Her husband did this?” Donovan asked.
“He did.”
“We’ll take the case. Tell Sarah to start working up papers for a temporary restraining order and have them ready for our client to review and sign tomorrow morning. If she approves, haul your ass into court tomorrow afternoon and get a TRO keeping Waterman away from their primary joint residence. Hire a PI right now and start tracking down all of his assets and his girlfriends. I want him tied up so tight he can’t take a piss without permission from the Court. You got all that?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Who’s your private investigator going to be?”
Cockran didn’t reply. Donovan didn’t like Bobby Sullivan, the instinctive reaction of a man steeped in the law toward someone who wrote his own laws. Still, Donovan had grudgingly conceded that Cockran had made the right choice in hiring Sullivan the year before for a client assignment in Germany where he had crossed swords, literally, with Wesley Waterman. When the German authorities had done nothing to protect the people and property of Cockran’s client from Nazi extortion, he let Sullivan off the leash. Donovan hadn’t asked and Cockran hadn’t said if Sullivan had been responsible for the car bombing and other mayhem visited upon the SS goons hired by Waterman to terrorize Cockran’s client. But Bill Donovan was nobody’s fool.
Finally, Donovan broke the silence and acknowledged the inevitable. “All right,” he said, a resigned look on his face. “Given what happened to you in Germany and that it’s Waterman as an adversary again, I suppose it’s okay to hire Sullivan. He’s probably as good a choice as any to get the dirt on Waterman and his showgirls. But is he up to doing the kind of financial investigation you’re going to need in this case?” Donovan asked.
“He is,” Cockran replied. “We’re going to need inside information, probably from his accountants, and Bobby can be.…” Cockran paused and searched for the right words. He smiled. “Peculiarly persuasive, is how I would phrase it.”
Donovan smiled, laughed softly and shook his big head from side to side. “I’ll bet he can.”
11.
Keep Your Damn Autogiro!
The Cedars
Sands Point, Long Island
Tuesday, 10 May 1932
COCKRAN’S Packard pulled up in back of the large shingled, multi-gabled house his father had purchased back in the 1880s after marrying Cockran’s mother, the mercantile heiress Rhoda Mack. As he stepped out of the Packard’s front passenger seat, he told his chauffeur Jimmy to take the motorcar back to Manhattan. He would drive himself tomorrow in the Auburn boat-tailed speedster which Mattie had driven out earlier in the day. Walking to the front porch, he noticed the early evening sun shining off the kelly green fuselage of his autogiro, The Celtic Princess, Hearst’s Metrotone News logo a pale yellow against the bright green. Cockran smiled. Once Hearst heard he and Mattie were planning a cross-country flight in July intending to break Amelia Earhart’s record, he offered to pay all their expenses if they would give him exclusive rights to “The Great Autogiro Race: Hearst Papers’ Own Mattie McGary vs. Amelia Earhart” and let his autogiro be used as a flying billboard for Hearst’s Metrotone News.
Cockran crossed the long covered porch at the back of the house and let himself in. He turned toward the dining room and kitchen beyond, calling out for Mattie as he did so. Mattie had said she would cook a going-away dinner for the two of them. She wouldn’t tell him what it was but promised that it would include his favorites. Cockran was counting on steak. He pushed through the swinging door into the large airy kitchen to find Mattie McGary facing away from him, stirring a pitcher of martinis on the countertop next to a plate containing two fourteen-ounce New York strip steaks and wearing nothing but an apron. He stopped short, his face breaking into a broad grin as he gazed at Mattie’s gorgeous ass. Something a lot better than steak was also on the menu tonight. A good thing Patrick and his grandmother were back in Manhattan.
“Leave the groceries over there, Wally,” Mattie said, with her back to Cockran. “You’re just in time for cocktails,” as she poured two martinis into stemmed glasses on a silver tray.
“Oh, Bourke! It’s you. You’re early,” she said as she turned to face him, her grin as broad as his. “I wasn’t expecting you for another hour.”
Cockran laughed. “I’ll bet. So what’s on the menu besides steak?”
“I’ve got two desserts for you tonight,” she said. “Over there is the crème brulée. Would you like to risk spoiling your supper having the other dessert before I grill the steaks?”
“And the other dessert would be?” Cockran asked.
“Me.”
“Where?”
“The pantry. Isn’t that where you country squires typically take your kitchen help, bend them over a serving table, then ravish them to your heart’s content?”
“Usually, but it depends.”
“On what?”
“The only reason to go all the way to the pantry is if you would otherwise have an audience in the kitchen while you subdued the wench,” Cockran said.
“Well, there’s no one else here,” Mattie said, “and the wench is defenseless and completely at your mercy.”
“That she is,” Cockran said, as he put aside his martini glass and reached out for her.
MATTIE took the last bite of her Caesar salad and then a sip of the 1923 Medoc she had opened for dinner. They had showered together after their kitchen floor adventures and they were each wearing thick, white terrycloth robes.
“Bourke, have you given any more thought to my borrowing the Celtic Princess? Two more victims were discovered yesterday. In Denver and Los Angeles. Everyone agreed it would be ever so convenient if we weren’t bound by train schedules. If we could just take off for the next city whenever we wanted. The sooner we get to all these cities, the sooner I’ll be back. Plus it will give me good cross-country experience for our publicity flight in July.”
“We?” Cockran asked, raising his eyebrows as he sliced a piece of steak. “Hearst has given you an assistant on this story?”
“Sort of. He thinks it’s a big story, big enough for two reporters, especially now with ten victims. I tried to talk him out of it. You know how I hate to share a by-line. But no luck.”
“Anyone I know?” Cockran asked, slicing off another piece of steak.
Mattie sighed. “I’m not happy about this. But, well… it’s Ted Hudson.”
Cockran didn’t reply. He kept his courtroom face on, betraying no emotion—or so he hoped—as he took in what was not good news. The woman he loved was going on an extended assignment with a charming, handsome and thoroughly unprincipled snake. A man whom she once had dated, if not more. And Cockran instinctively knew it had been more
The Gemini Agenda Page 6