Took one to know one.
The commissar was still yakking when from nowhere the mayor—finally out of his pajamas and into a dignified suit and tie, hair neatly combed but face still gray—emerged to walk up onto the platform and push the commissar out of the way. Suddenly blue-uniformed police came up onto the stage and dragged off the protesting commissar, Kornfeder feeding corn to the wildly applauding audience to the very end.
With an austere dignified smile, the mayor said into the microphone, “I am here, good people of Mosinee, to announce that democracy has been restored to our fair city.”
More, even wilder applause now. Whistles and hoots and hollers.
As if in reaction, the mayor’s eyes widened.
But then he clutched his chest and seemed to be working at keeping his balance, as blurts of concern blossomed around the crowd. Finally he slumped to the wooden flooring, first on his knees, then onto his side, feet drawn up into a fetal position.
A collective gasp came up.
“Now what?” I asked McCarthy.
“That’s not scheduled,” the senator said, eyes disappearing into slits. Not smiling at all now. He took me by the arm. “Come on, Nate, let’s find my man and get out of here. This looks like something not to be a part of.”
Screams and wails were going up from the assemblage and we passed a screaming, wailing ambulance as in our black Buick we headed out of the liberated little community, making a getaway worthy of bank robbers.
* * *
Robbers back in Dillinger days were said to have escaped coppers via tunnels below the Hotel Wausau. But Joe McCarthy and I, in the downtown hotel’s restaurant off its Gothic cathedral of a lobby, weren’t hiding from anybody.
A scattering of diners exchanged glances and stole looks as the senator and I sat in a booth, the dark, rich wood around us typical of the hotel. McCarthy was working on a well-done porterhouse steak about the size of a hubcap and a buttered baked potato not much larger than a hand grenade. His short arms were pumping and his big hands were balled as he carved with knife and fork.
Delicate eater that I was, I had settled for a club steak, rare, and some hash browns with onions. McCarthy was drinking beer, and so was I. Schlitz. Made Milwaukee famous, you know.
We were inside an eight-story 1880s brick structure courtesy of Chicago architects Roche and Holabird—who turned out such little numbers as Soldier Field and the Art Institute—which might have made a Chicago boy feel at home. It didn’t. I had come to Wisconsin and Joe McCarthy’s table on a mission of mercy, or seeking mercy anyway, and right now my dinner companion didn’t seem merciful at all. Certainly the porterhouse was being shown none.
“There’s no question this friend of yours was in any number of Communist front groups,” he said between bites. When he said things like that, McCarthy fell into public speaking mode, forcing his baritone up into second tenor and emphasizing random words by dropping them back down.
“Youthful college days,” I said. “He didn’t know better. It was the Depression. You remember the Depression, don’t you, Joe? Lots of folks out of work. Weren’t you an FDR man back then?”
He grinned and had some more steak, chewed, swallowed, said, “But he’s a scientist. They’re the worst kind. Damnit, Nate, he worked on the Manhattan Project! Think what he had access to.”
“Early days at the University of Chicago. A minor figure, Joe. And back then the government gave him a full security clearance.”
“Quit assin’ around, Heller! In those days Uncle Sam let more Commies in than a half-ass henhouse fence does foxes. My boys tell me your pal is just another State Department Red.”
“He doesn’t work for the State Department, Joe. He’s a full-time professor now.”
“Filling empty young minds with dangerous propaganda.”
“No. Just physics. He does a little consulting with State, that’s all. Did your people find any Soviet ties?”
“… No.”
“Can you give him a pass, Joe? As a favor?”
He moved on to the baked potato, using the steak knife to cut down to and through the skin. “How are you and our buddy Drew gettin’ along?”
This was not the non sequitur it seemed. Reporter Drew Pearson, easily the nation’s most powerful syndicated left-of-center columnist, had once been very friendly with McCarthy, who had provided him and his man Jack Anderson with all kinds of inside dope from the Hill. But lately Pearson had been running negative items on McCarthy. The bloom could well be off the rose.
“We fell out,” I said, spearing some hash browns and onions, “after what he did to Jim Forrestal.”
Former Secretary of Defense Forrestal, a client of mine, had committed suicide in the midst of a heavy Pearson smear campaign. I’d stopped doing investigative work for Drew because of that.
“Glad to hear it,” he said, as he chewed potato. “As for your professor pal … let me sleep on it. I’ll let you know in the morning. When do you fly out?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Come by my room at eight and we’ll have breakfast.”
As for the name of my friend at the University of Chicago, that isn’t pertinent to this narrative. Just in case you thought I was somebody who named names.
We were having apple pie when McCarthy’s slender young staffer came around and leaned in. His name I can’t give you because I don’t remember it, but I can tell you he had a nicer suit and tie than his boss.
“Senator … turns out Mayor Cronenwetter had a heart attack back there. He’s in the hospital in critical condition here in Wausau. Did you want me to arrange to go out there and…?”
The hooded eyes flared. “No. We, uh, don’t want to intrude on the family.”
The staffer nodded and disappeared so fast I expected a puff of smoke.
McCarthy said, “Damn shame.”
“Yeah. Too bad.”
“Really casts a pall on a great day.”
That evening I kept McCarthy company on a walking tour of downtown Wausau bars. He put away more beer than a bachelor party and yet circulated among the citizens, pumping hands like they were so many more porterhouses he was carving. I’ll give him this: He seemed to know them all by name, and he sat and laughed and talked with maybe a dozen of them.
Shanty Irish Joe had the common touch, all right. This was his base—Wisconsin’s German, Polish, and Czech voters. My Irish looks, courtesy of my mother, made me fit right in. Would I have been as welcome, I wondered, if my apostate Jewish pop showed more clearly in my features?
I also wondered if I’d be this welcome at Joe’s table if he knew my pop had been an old union man, a Wobbly who ran a left-wing bookstore on the West Side.
We wound up back in the hotel bar. I hadn’t had near as many beers as him, but enough to ask some questions that might have been ill-advised.
For example. “Joe, you used to be a Democrat. Civil rights, race relations … a damn moderate. How you’d get to where you are now?”
Drunk, he was in full-blown nasal speechifying. “I was a Democrat because I was ignorant. I know now they’re all a bunch of Commie-crats. Whether they know it or not, they’re part of a conspiracy on a scale so immense it dwarfs anything in human history.”
“You really believe that.”
“Damn right I do. And we have our friend Jim Forrestal to thank.”
“Oh?”
“He’s the boyo who clued me in about the Commie threat in government.”
He was also the boyo who jumped to his death from a high window in an insane asylum.
I said, “Well, it’s sure working for you. That speech you made in Wheeling, it really started the ball rolling.”
He didn’t deny it. He grinned a little and the droopy-lidded eyes glittered. “I got hold of something here, Nate, something really good. Something that’ll help me and our country.”
“But some of these people you’re accusing, Joe—you’re painting them with an awful wide brush.”
He shrugged and sipped from his pilsner. “If I’m right in the larger sense … and I am … it doesn’t matter a damn that the details are wrong.”
I was pretty drunk myself, but not enough to buy that bullshit. Still, I was sober enough not to say so.
* * *
The next morning I stopped by McCarthy’s suite at eight o’clock. The door was answered by the young staffer, who was in a silk mauve dressing robe. He looked tired but I didn’t sense I’d woken him.
“I’m afraid the senator’s indisposed.” He was blocking the way.
“Joe said to stop by and get him for breakfast.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s in shape for that.”
I pushed through. “I need to talk to him before I head back.”
There was a living room area and two bedrooms. In one of the latter I found a nude Joe McCarthy sitting up in bed, pillows propped behind him, pouring himself a glass of something from a pitcher. I thought at first it was water.
But raising his glass, he asked, “Care for a martini, Nate?”
I will spare you any description of a naked Joe McCarthy, other than to say it would have involved hair, muscle, flab, and an appendage that was limp, which was fine by me.
“No, Joe, I better grab a quick breakfast downstairs. You want to throw something on and join me?”
“No. No, I’m fine.” He set the pitcher on the nightstand next to a little pile of pulp westerns. “Listen, I gave it some thought.”
“Uh, yeah?” I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I hoped he meant my University of Chicago friend.
“How did you know I was looking into that professor guy? That pinko scientist … how?”
“The private detective agency you hired to investigate him in Chicago is one I farm things out to sometimes. A colleague there clued me in. Professional courtesy.”
“Breach of trust, I say. Bastard shoulda kept that name to himself.” He grunted. “But you, Nate, you’re a good guy, looking out for a pal. What the hell. I’m gonna give him a pass.”
Right then he could’ve wrapped one of those sheets around himself and passed for Nero, even without a laurel wreath—thumbs-up, thumbs-down.
“I appreciate that, Joe.”
He grinned goofily and held out his hand for me to shake. Handshaking was a staple of his approach, though I found it as clammy as it was vigorous. And I wasn’t comfortable being that close to the naked senator.
Not that the image put me off breakfast—you develop a strong stomach in my line—and I made the ten a.m. flight just fine.
That was the end of my Mosinee adventure, but there is a postscript: Mayor Ralph Kronwetter, forty-nine, died on May 6. And Reverend Will La Brew, seventy-two, who had so indignantly promised the fake Commies he would hide his Bible, was found dead in his bed the next morning. A spokesman from the Mosinee American Legion called it “a terrible, tragic coincidence.”
But the doctor who’d treated them both said “the excitement and exertion of the day” had likely “contributed” to their untimely passings.
On the other hand, it was still relatively bloodless for a coup.
CHAPTER
2
Washington, D.C., March 26, 1953
I’m not sure I would trust anybody in my business who read private eye novels. Reading the “true detective” magazines was a different story, because there was always a chance you could place a case of yours there and get some publicity, or possibly a little dough if you split with a reporter or even wrote it up yourself.
The pulps and the paperbacks were such a travesty on what a real private investigator did that I had no time for them, and I was perfectly capable of giving rise to my own sex scenes, thank you, and as for violence, that was mercifully rare in coming.
But scratch somebody in my profession and you’ll find a onetime reader of the romantic version of what we do. For me it was Sherlock Holmes and Nick Carter and eventually Black Mask, a pulp magazine I read in the twenties as a very young man. All that stuff had gone into the hopper and helped point kids like me toward police work. It hadn’t strictly been the graft.
One of the Black Mask boys, as the editor liked to refer to his stable of writers, was an actual ex–Pinkerton operative, and his stories had an understated yet gritty reality the rest of the pulp-paper yarns lacked. When the writer graduated to publishing actual books, I had stayed with him, through my early years on the Chicago P.D. and even later as a private detective. I might have kept reading him, but I hadn’t seen anything new by him in the bookstalls for a while.
“Samuel Dashiell Hammett,” the frail thin man said, seated at a table with a glass of water, two microphones trained on either side of him like rifles, and a glass ashtray where he had stood a pack of Camels upright.
A flat nasal voice from the dais, where a brace of senators sat with various staffers behind them, asked: “And what is your occupation?”
“Writer.” He had a full head of brushed-back white hair, darker eyebrows, salt-and-pepper mustache, and a handsome if ravaged, sunken-cheeked face the color of typing paper. In a medium-gray suit with a dark gray tie and a breast-pocket handkerchief, this was the kind of man who seemed dapper without trying.
The kid playing prosecutor—and he was a kid, still in his twenties—was Roy Cohn, who’d made a name for himself in the Rosenberg “atomic spy” case, as assistant to District Attorney Irving Saypol. With his slicked-back black hair, high forehead, reptilian hooded eyes, and cleft chin, he might have been the son of the man he sat next to—Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Referring pointlessly to his notes, Cohn said, “You’re the author of some rather well-known detective stories. Is that correct?”
Hammett leaned forward, elbows on the table. He looked comfortable, or at least not uncomfortable. “That is right.”
“In addition to that, you have written on some social issues. Is that correct?”
The emaciated-looking writer’s shrug involved his whole upper body. “Well, it’s impossible to write anything without taking some sort of stand on social issues.”
I was seated off to one side, just behind the press tables, in the gallery of the Caucus Room in the S.O.B., as the Senate Office Building was nicknamed. The vast rectangular room with its trio of grand sun-streaming windows had an oddly French-derived style, from the black-veined marble floors to the ceiling with its gilded rosettes. The smell of cigarette smoke—allowed between witness appearances—did cut the elegance somewhat, as did the rumpled suits of reporters and politicos.
This was a hearing of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the use of federal funds to purchase books by known Communists for State Department libraries abroad. I recognized one of the senators—loquacious Everett Dirksen from my home state of Illinois—but it was Cohn, the young committee counsel, doing the talking right now.
The young prosecutor turned to McCarthy and they exchanged sleepy-eyed looks. “Mr. Chairman, some three hundred books by Mr. Hammett are in the Information Service today in some seventy-three information centers.”
“That’s a lot of books,” Hammett cut in, with a smile that managed to be both wide and barely perceptible.
“I’m sorry—three hundred copies, eighteen books.” The young prosecutor offered up a slight smile to his witness. “I realize you haven’t written three hundred books. About how many have you written?”
“Five, I think.”
“Just five books?”
“Yes, and many short stories that have been collected in reprint books.”
Cohn nodded, thumbing through his papers. “There are eighteen books in use, including some collections. Now, Mr. Hammett, when did you write your first published book?”
The author’s head tipped to one side. “The first book was Red Harvest in 1929.”
“At the time you wrote that book, were you a member of the Communist Party?”
Hammett’s chin came up, as if inviting a swing; but his voice was quietly nonc
onfrontational. “I decline to answer on the grounds that an answer might tend to incriminate me, relying on my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the United States.”
Cohn had expected that. “When did you write your last published book?”
Hammett’s frown was as barely perceptible as his smile. “Well, I can’t really answer that … because of the short story collections. I imagine it was sometime in the thirties or forties.”
Cohn nodded. “And at that time were you a member of the Communist Party?”
“Same answer.”
McCarthy hunkered toward the microphone, gesturing with his black-rimmed glasses, the beast awakening.
“Mr. Hammett,” he said, his voice dripping cold contempt, “let me ask you this. Forgetting about yourself for the time being, is it a safe assumption that any member of the Communist Party … under Communist discipline … would propagandize the Communist cause regardless of whether he was writing fiction books or books on politics?”
McCarthy’s oratorical style was in full sway, that familiar nasal second tenor randomly dropping and raising register for emphasis.
Unimpressed, Hammett shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”
McCarthy leaned in farther, teeth showing in nothing like a smile. “Refusing to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate you is normally taken by this committee … and by this country … as meaning that you are a member of the Communist Party. Therefore, you should know considerable about the Communist movement.”
Hammett’s eyebrows were up; there was something lazy about it. “Was that a question, sir?”
Now McCarthy accompanied his emphasized words with bobs of the head. “That is just a comment on your statement.” He swung toward Cohn. “Mr. Counsel, do you have anything further?”
Cohn flashed a nervous smile and sat forward, the smartest kid in class. “Oh yes … Mr. Hammett, from these various books you’ve written, have you received royalty payments?”
“I have.”
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