Majic Man nh-10

by Max Allan Collins

  “Glad to hear that.” The Secret Service chief gestured toward me with a thumb, like he was hitchhiking. “I’d like to speak further with you, Doctor, but first I need a few minutes with Mr. Heller.”

  “Certainly.” He half-bowed. “I’m at your service. I’ll wait at the nurses’ station.”

  “If you would.”

  Bernstein nodded curtly and turned down the hallway at left, moving toward the agents clustered at the waiting area across from the duty nurse’s desk.

  “Covering his ass already,” I said.

  “There’ll be a lot of that in this case,” Baughman said, with a humorless laugh. “Listen, before you and I talk, I need to interview those corpsmen and the sleeping shrink. Care to sit in?”

  “Love to.”

  We began walking again, Baughman saying, “We’ll talk to this boy who worked the early shift, first. He was close to Mr. Forrestal-of the three corpsmen assigned to him, this kid was his favorite-and the boy’s been quite upset. I’m hoping he’s composed enough to speak to us, now.”

  Self-composure was exactly what Navy Medical Corpsman Edward Prise seemed to be trying to maintain; looking like the sailor he technically was, in his white uniform with its dark neckerchief, the corpsman sat erect in Forrestal’s padded wooden chair, which had been yanked out into the middle of the dimly lighted double room. Towheaded, ruddy-cheeked Prise, in his early twenties and looking impossibly young, had a glazed expression, the whites of his blue eyes red with crying; he was turning his bucket cap in his hand like a wheel.

  Baughman, his tall thin frame looming over the boy, stood with hands on hips; though his voice was almost kind, the Secret Service chief’s presence was surely intimidating as he asked, “What can you tell us about tonight, Edward?”

  Another plainclothesman, presumably Secret Service, took notes while Baughman conducted the low-key interrogation. There were three plainclothes agents in the room with us, and, again, FBI and/or CIA may have been among them; no one clued me in.

  “Bad luck, sir,” the boy said. “Terrible bad luck. Normally we watch … watched … Mr. Forrestal on eight-hour ’round the-clock shifts. The shift change is usually at nine p.m., but we had to double up tonight, sir.”

  “Why is that, son?”

  “My usual replacement picked Friday night to go absent without leave, sir, and get drunk on his butt; he’s in the brig, and now we’re shorthanded. So this new fella, Bob Harrison, just a hospital apprentice, is not attuned to the …” The boy looked for the right word. “… subtleties and hazards of this particular situation, sir. He didn’t know Mr. Forrestal, and Mr. Forrestal didn’t know him. So I was concerned, when I went off duty, sir.”

  “Strictly because of your replacement’s inexperience?”

  “That wasn’t the only thing. Mr. Forrestal had seemed in good spirits today, and real energetic, but also, this evening, he seemed restless. He refused his usual sleeping pill and sedative, saying he wanted to stay up late and read, tonight.”

  “The patient had leeway to do that?”

  “We don’t force-feed medication, sir. That’s hospital policy. I did notify, or tried to notify, Dr. Deen of my concerns. He was sleeping in that adjacent room, you know? Dr. Deen wasn’t happy I woke him up, which was typical.”

  “Of Deen?”

  “No, sir, he’s not better or worse than any of them, frankly, sir. None of these doctors like to get advice on their patients from enlisted corpsmen. I stuck around, after midnight, for maybe half an hour-I just had a bad feeling. But, finally, I left-you know how it is, sir. Against regulations to just hang about.”

  Baughman nodded. “Your watch was over and custom, and discipline, dictated you go about your business elsewhere. You did nothing wrong, son.”

  Now Prise began to cry; quietly sobbing. “I … I went back to my room at the barracks, but I couldn’t sleep. Musta tossed and turned for a good hour. Finally I just got dressed and was walkin’ across the hospital grounds, to the canteen, for a cup of coffee, you know? And all of a sudden there was this big commotion, yelling, running, alarm bells … and I just felt sick to my stomach. I knew what happened. Somehow I just knew.”

  Baughman put a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s all right, son. It’s all right.”

  “Mr. Forrestal, he … he was the most interesting man I ever met, a great and famous man. I was going to go to work for him, after he got out. He said I’d be his ‘man Friday,’ you know, chauffeur, valet and all.” The corpsman shook his head. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, out the window … my one big chance.”

  Baughman looked at me, said, “Let’s go next door,” and nodded toward the bathroom that connected the rooms. But he paused in the john, with both doors closed, to ask me what I made of Prise’s story.

  “Nothing sounds fishy there to me,” I said. “Kid is sincere enough. Of course, I think his tears are more for his future than his pal Forrestal.”

  Baughman nodded. “Let’s see what this other boy has to say.”

  Corpsman Robert Harrison, another impossibly young kid, dark-haired, skinny, said, “Tell you the truth, I was supposed to check on him every five minutes, but he got irritated with that. So I cut it to fifteen.”

  Baughman was again doing the interrogating while one of another trio of plainclothes agents stationed in this room took the notes. “You came on at midnight?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he was still awake?”

  “Yeah, well-at one-thirty, he was asleep, or seemed to be. When I looked in on him at one forty-five, he was up, sitting at his desk, writing … not writing exactly, copying something from a book.”

  I wondered what that was about. The only two books in the room I knew of were that Catholic tome by Monsignor Sheen and the poetry anthology I’d given him.

  The kid was saying, “I told him if he was having trouble sleeping, maybe he should have a sleeping pill … sodium amytal is what we use.”

  The corpsman apparently wanted to let us know he knew his stuff, even if the psychiatric patient he’d been charged to watch had jumped out the window.

  “But Mr. Forrestal refused the pill,” the boy said. “I went down to check with the floor nurse about it, but she was away from her desk. So I woke Dr. Deen up, right here in this room, and he wasn’t happy with me. Told me if Mr. Forrestal didn’t want the sleeping tablet, he didn’t have to take it.”

  “When did you check on Mr. Forrestal again?”

  “I didn’t wait any fifteen minutes, that’s for sure! I stepped it back up to five … it was one-fifty. And Mr. Forrestal’s bed was empty. I woke Dr. Deen up, and we looked for him, and we saw the screen in the pantry was took out, and looked out the window and … well, he was down there, but they’d already found him. We were kinda shook up, me and the doc-just sat down at the table there, in the pantry. Figured, you know, it was obvious who he was. But I guess the patient got messed up pretty bad in the fall, and some nurse came up to do a bed check and we told her it was Forrestal who fell … or jumped.”

  “… Thank you, Robert.” Baughman turned to the other agents. “Anyone have anything else?”

  Baughman may not have been including me in that question, but I asked, “Robert, what was Mr. Forrestal copying?”

  “I don’t know. Just something out of some big red book.”

  My book of poetry. Was this the “substitute” for a suicide note Baughman mentioned to Dr. Bernstein?

  “We found what he wrote,” Baughman said to me. “Let you have a look, later.” He turned to the note-taking agent. “Show Robert out, would you? And bring Dr. Deen in?”

  The slender, handsome young doctor who had slept through Forrestal’s journey out the pantry window did not look like he’d be getting any more sleep tonight. Anguish was etched in his pasty-white face, the blueness of his night-duty beard giving him an unwashed look; his dark hair was uncombed and his eyes were wide and haunted. A sleeve of his white jacket hung loose, torn
away from the shoulder.

  “How did that happen, Doctor?” Baughman asked his seated interview subject, nodding at the sleeve.

  “I tore it loose.”

  “How?”

  “Yanked on it myself.”

  “Why?”

  Deen swallowed. “When I saw that corpsman, Prise, step out of the elevator … he was coming up to see what happened, you know, in the brief bedlam after the body was discovered.” He shook his head. “The look the kid gave me … accusing look …” He lowered his head and covered his face with a hand.

  “That’s okay, Doctor …”

  He raised his head; his face was slick with tears. “Nothing’s okay. Why did I tear off my sleeve, when I saw that kid who’d tried to warn me, looking at me? Because I couldn’t reach my heart.”

  Baughman asked him the pertinent questions, and the story the doctor told mirrored and corroborated those of the two corpsmen.

  “I don’t think I was negligent,” he said, wearily, “not really-not when both Dr. Raines and Dr. Bernstein told me the patient was close to full recovery. But that won’t make this any easier to live with.”

  A while later in the hallway, Baughman said, “Getting the picture, Mr. Heller? It’s not a murder, it’s a suicide.”

  “If you say so.”

  Baughman smiled at my misgivings, saying, “I tell you what-let’s take a look at the crime scene. I believe you’ll quickly concur with our findings.”

  He led me into the tiny diet kitchen, where a plainclothes photographer-apparently just finishing up-was loading up his gear, and a white-jacketed technician was also closing up his kit, which sat on the porcelain tabletop where, not so long ago, Forrestal and I had sat, in friendly conversation.

  The screen had been removed from the window and rested against the wall, at the left of the radiator under the window yawning open onto, and letting in, the cool night.

  “No usable fingerprints on the sill or the screen,” the white-jacketed technician told Baughman; he was a bald, bespectacled guy of maybe thirty, with a flatly expressionless voice. “Smudges only. Same for the radiator, and the wall. But that would be expected, considering.”

  “How about the sill outside?” Baughman asked.

  “Sorry. Nothing. But did you see the scuff marks, on the concrete?”

  “No.” Baughman moved to the window and I tagged along. He leaned way out, studying the concrete below the window. Pulling back in, he nodded toward the window, inviting me to have a look. I did. Scuff marks and scratches on the concrete indicated Forrestal, in the process of trying to hang himself, may have changed his mind and tried to climb back in, to safety, to no avail. The view out this window-unlike the pleasant, bustling one of the hospital’s driveway from room 1618-was bleak: a small, dark utility building and weedy overgrown vacant lots.

  “Did you dust out there?” Baughman was asking the technician.

  “As best I could. But if the guy was flailing out there, slappin’ and clawin’, it’s unlikely he left a clear print of any kind. I suppose we could put a ladder up, from that roof below, and see what we come up with.”

  Baughman thought about that, then said, “Thanks, Frank. Maybe we’ll do that, in the daylight…. You’re done here, then?”

  The photographer had already slipped out.

  “That’s your call, Chief,” the fingerprint man said. “Other than the ladder routine, I’m fresh out of ideas.”

  Baughman nodded, and the technician left.

  We were alone.

  I said, “Close the door, Chief, would you? I don’t want us to be overheard.”

  He did. We sat at the table; I was where Forrestal had been seated that afternoon, Baughman in my chair.

  “Don’t you find some of this troubling?” I asked.

  Baughman grunted. “Whole thing’s troubling.”

  “A nurse who steps away from her desk at just the right moment? A doctor who’d rather sleep than attend a patient? A suicidal patient, at that, kept on the sixteenth floor? Whose windows, overlooking the front of the hospital, have security locks in his own room, but who has access to a pantry, overlooking nothing, with a window screen you just have to look at hard to open?”

  “Mr. Heller …”

  “For Christ’s sake, call me Nate.”

  “Nate.” Baughman dug a pack of Camels out of his breast pocket, offered me one, which I declined, while he found a lighter in his suitcoat pocket, firing one up, saying, “My friends call me ‘Hughie,’ and this is a suicide. Open and shut.”

  “The only thing open and shut about this case is that fucking window. You’ve got a floor nurse, a corpsman and a doctor simultaneously out of action, either away from their posts or sleeping like a baby. Maybe that was arranged so somebody could drop by Forrestal’s room after visiting hours, and find him alone, unprotected. How do you know somebody-either a hospital employee, or somebody from the outside, hospitals have notoriously poor security, even military ones-how do you know somebody didn’t accost Forrestal, either catching him in the pantry or dragging him over there, strangling him with the cord of his robe, tossing him out of the window, then taking the elevator, just a few steps down the hall, to freedom?”

  Baughman exhaled some smoke. “All right, Nate. Let’s play it your way. Are you saying that one of those young men-Prise, Harrison, or Dr. Deen-is a part-time hired assassin? Whichever one it is, he’s an excellent actor, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Come on, Baughman, this is a naval hospital, a military installation, professional killers for Uncle Sam are treated here every day. Anyway, I didn’t say it was one of those three … I admit, none of them seem likely….”

  “Neither is your scenario.” He drew in some smoke, let it stream out, saying, “I do not see how a killer could have sneaked in, skulked around, strangled Forrestal, tossed him from the window and slipped out unseen. The quarters on this cramped floor are just too damn close. That nurse or corpsman could show back up, anytime. And the doctor’s sleeping in a room literally next door to this pantry.”

  I held up both hands, palms out. “All I’m saying is, don’t be too hasty, writing this off as a suicide. This begs for a full and thorough investigation. Why don’t I see any Bethesda police detectives here? Or state police, or even sheriff’s boys?”

  Baughman shrugged. “This hospital is a U.S. naval reservation. There will be no local police investigation. And our investigation is almost to a close.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Then you’re not going to like what I have to say at the inquest. For one thing, the man I spoke to in this very room was about the least likely candidate for suicide that I can think of, based upon the conversation we had.”

  Shaking his head, Baughman said, “There’ll be no inquest, Nate. Coroner Brochart has ruled this a suicide.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Legal enough.”

  “You from Chicago originally, Hughie? By the way, why am I here, if I’m not a suspect? You haven’t asked me a thing about Forrestal’s behavior, his demeanor, today.”

  He gestured casually, cigarette in hand. “Two reasons, really. I did want your insights, where the crime scene was concerned …”

  “Which you’ve ignored.”

  “… and I wanted to ask you about the book of poetry.”

  “What?” I sat forward; this interested me. “You mean the book of poetry I gave Forrestal, this afternoon?”

  “Yes. He was apparently quite touched by the gift, and mentioned to young Prise that his friend Nate Heller had given it to him.”

  “Why is that significant? Is that the book he was copying from?”

  Baughman nodded, put out his Camel in an ashtray, and said, “Come with me.”

  Room 1618 was empty now, the agents in the hall, no more interrogations being conducted, unless you counted the occasional questions Baughman was asking me.

  The writing desk next to the nightstand, the bed next to it rumpled from Forrestal’s last night of on-and-off-ag
ain sleep, had on it the red-leather gold-trimmed Anthology of World Poetry. Two sheets of cheap paper and a fountain pen were next to the book, and written on the foolscap in Forrestal’s rather cramped hand were the words of a poem he’d copied.

  “What poem is this?” I asked.

  “It’s marked with a red-ribbon bookmark,” Baughman said, picking up the volume, opening it, holding it in one hand like a hymnal he was about to sing out of. “Sophocles. Called ‘The Chorus from Ajax.’”

  “I’m more a limerick man, myself. What sort of poem is this?”

  Baughman offered a brief half-smile. “Kipling’s about as poetic as I get. Fortunately, one of my agents, who has more refined literary tastes than the two of us, was familiar with it. He says it’s a ‘brooding’ poem, in which the warrior Ajax contemplates suicide.”

  “Really.”

  He nodded. “All about how desirable death is, how inviting the grave.”

  I read Forrestal’s copied version: “‘Better to die and sleep…. Worn by the waste of time-Comfortless, nameless, hopeless grave’… Well, it’s not Johnny Mercer.”

  Baughman smiled gently at me, but his eyes were hard and serious. “That’s what had me wondering, Nate. What possesses a ‘limerick man’ to pick up a book of poetry as a gift? Did Forrestal ask you to buy that particular book for him?”

  Forrestal hadn’t, but somebody had.

  I looked further down the sheet of foolscap: No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail/Of the lone bird, the querulous night, and there it stopped.

  “Is this the whole poem?” I asked.

  “No. Forrestal stopped midway-actually, in mid-word.”

  “No he didn’t. It’s right here: ‘night.’”

  Baughman shook his head, no. “That’s the first half of ‘nightingale.’”

  I frowned. “Forrestal stopped in the middle of the word ‘nightingale,’ got up, went across the hall and killed himself?”

  Nightingale … nightingale … why was that ringing a bell?

  “Apparently,” Baughman said. He hefted the red-and-gold volume. “So why this book, Nate? Was this Forrestal’s idea or not?”