Better Dead

by Max Allan Collins

  “I remember you, Bob.” His father, Joe, had been an occasional client of mine since the mid-’40s, back when the onetime big-league bootlegger had bought the Merchandise Mart much as I might buy a new car.

  “My dad and my brother,” he said, still smiling, “always speak warmly of you. You really helped us out of a jam that time.”

  He was referring to a job I’d done half a dozen years ago, getting Jack out of a quickie marriage the young senator had screwed and boozed himself into one ill-advised night. It had taken bribing a courthouse clerk, playing with matches, and paying off the socialite bride, just another day’s work for a Chicago-bred PI.

  Typical that Bob would credit that as me helping the family and not just a brother whose brain went soft when his dick got hard.

  I said, “You must be a lawyer by now.”

  He nodded. I put him at around twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight. “Graduated last year. I was, uh, at Justice for a while, now I’m working for Joe. Family friend. Assistant counsel.”

  “Does that mean you assist that Cohn character?”

  His smile disappeared, and his voice lowered to a near whisper. “I keep my distance as much as possible. We don’t, uh, exactly get along. He thinks I’m a spoiled rich kid, which is, uh, rich since he’s a judge’s son with his own silver spoon.”

  “So—you’re married, I understand.”

  The grin returned with some shyness mixed in. “Coming up on our third anniversary. Two little ones, boy and a girl, Joe and Kathleen.”

  Missing his cue by maybe half a minute, sleepy-eyed Roy Cohn—similar to Bob in height, weight, build, and age but cheerless and darker—emerged from McCarthy’s office in shirtsleeves and crisp navy silk tie.

  “Mr. Heller, the senator will see you now.… Would you like coffee?”

  “That’d be fine,” I said.

  Cohn nodded. Without looking at him, he said to Bob, “Coffee.”

  I could almost hear Kennedy bristle. Maybe he missed “waiter day” at law school.

  Cohn held the door for me while the assistant counsel went off to do his master’s bidding.

  I went into the rather barren-looking office—beyond a few framed certificates of election, the brown-paneled chamber lacked the usual framed photos and honorary degrees, the only memento a baseball bat on a pedestal between file cabinets on a counter. Burned into the bat were the words “DREW PEARSON.”

  In rolled-up shirtsleeves and food-stained tie, McCarthy was in his big-backed swivel chair behind his massive standard-issue senatorial desk, its top littered with files and papers. A pair of button-tufted leather armchairs sat opposite him. He wore black-framed glasses, which took nothing away from the bullnecked-brute effect.

  Giving me a tight smile, he flipped aside a stapled report, tossed his glasses on the desk, and waved me over.

  “Saw you in the gallery this morning, Nate,” he said, the nasal baritone muted now, the oratorical eccentricities absent. “Hope you enjoyed seeing democracy in action.”

  I took one of the leather chairs; Cohn took the other. His face looked like putty awaiting a sculptor to make an expression out of it.

  I shrugged. “I thought the mystery writer held his own. I saw The Maltese Falcon during the war and didn’t have any particular urge to overthrow the government. Except maybe my sergeant.”

  McCarthy, who like me had been a Marine, smiled but I knew he didn’t like what I’d said. His big shoulders lifted and left his barrel chest behind.

  “I agree,” he said, “that it’s probably unlikely there’s much overt Communist content in those books of his. But why should the government put money in the hands of some fool who’s going to funnel it into the Communist cause?”

  I nodded. “He seemed to agree with you on that point.”

  “He’s a strange character. One of these oddball left-wing artistic types.” McCarthy shook his head, then his dark eyes bore in on me. “But you’re probably wondering why I sent you a plane ticket to come and talk to me.”

  “I am. But since you’re paying my day rate, too, how could I say no? Like you, Joe, I’m in favor of the capitalist system.”

  A big off-white smile blossomed in the blue-jowled face. “I was always impressed by your investigative abilities, Nate … and I got to feeling bad about how I’ve underutilized you of late. Ever since that bastard Pearson betrayed me.”

  In 1953 retrospect, rabid Red hunter McCarthy and arch-liberal columnist Pearson seemed unlikely bedfellows. But in the early years of McCarthy’s first term, Joe and Drew had worked together ferreting out governmental corruption.

  After all, from 1947 up to ’50—possibly due to his New Deal roots—McCarthy had been a liberal Republican, his seat partly won by courting the Communist vote. As Joe said on the stump, they had “the same right to vote as anybody else.” And for several years, the junior senator from Wisconsin had swapped Senate secrets with Pearson’s man Jack Anderson for flattering squibs in the nationally syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column.

  I had worked for McCarthy and Pearson, helping them expose D.C. influence peddlers getting 5 percent kickbacks on government business. Then I’d fallen out with Drew over his merciless haranguing of my friend and client Jim Forrestal.

  McCarthy dropped Pearson, too, after the columnist attacked him in print as a reckless witch hunter. McCarthy retaliated with an all-out assault on Pearson on the Senate floor (“a Moscow-directed character assassin!”), where Joe had immunity from slander charges.

  “I’m gearing up for a major investigation,” McCarthy said, the weirdly hypnotic oratorical rhythm kicking in, “into the darkest shadows of this government—from the military to the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “That sounds ambitious,” I said. And foolhardy.

  “Our country is riddled with military bases with security so lax it’s criminal. Roy here is convinced that a spy ring rivaling the one that gave the Soviets the atomic bomb is operating out of an army base in New Jersey.”

  I shifted, uncomfortable in my comfortable chair. “Joe, you do know your Republican president—I believe his name is Eisenhower?—has a certain affection for the military.”

  He waved that pesky fly away. “And the CIA—its own director admits he’s well aware Communists have infiltrated his organization! But he justifies it because other countries have the same problem! Something must be done.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He almost crawled across the desk at me. “But I need trained investigators. Most of my staff is not qualified or experienced enough for what I intend to do. Roy here is the best I have—and don’t be fooled by his youth!”

  Now McCarthy sat back and interlaced his hands on his belly, getting chummy and conversational. “I guess you know Roy helped put the Rosenbergs away … but he also put a dozen other Commies away, as assistant U.S. attorney in New York, and nabbed counterfeiters and narcotics traffickers.”

  I gave Cohn a grudging smile and said, “Nice going.”

  He looked at me with an unsettling blankness. “Doing my job.”

  The door opened behind us and a glum Bob Kennedy came in carrying a wooden tray with coffee cups, sugar and cream dispensers, and a pot of coffee issuing steam like the Little Engine That Could. The nearest corner of the big desk had room for the tray and Kennedy leaned past Cohn to set it there. He gave McCarthy a small nod and smaller smile, and was turning to go when Cohn spoke to him.

  “I’ll have sugar and cream. Cream for the senator. Mr. Heller?”

  “Black is fine,” I said.

  Kennedy winced and then returned to the tray and started serving us up.

  McCarthy went on: “This young man here, Senator John Kennedy’s brother Robert, is probably our second-best investigator on staff, after Roy.”

  Kennedy spilled just a little as he poured a cup.

  McCarthy continued singing the gopher’s praises: “Bob spent half a year at Justice, in the Internal Security Section, Criminal Division, i
nvestigating Soviet spies. Here in this office he’s been helping expose trade between U.S. allies and Communist China, doing a crackerjack job.… Thank you, Bob.”

  Kennedy had just handed the senator his coffee.

  Cohn took his filled cup from the tray, as if to minimize contact with Kennedy, who I gave a knowing look and a nod as he came around and handed me mine with half a smirk. Then the assistant counsel gathered whatever dignity he could salvage and went quickly out.

  “I am well aware, Nate,” McCarthy said, the speechifying style lingering but muted, “that you’re a very successful businessman—three branch offices now. Really something. But your country needs you, Nate.”

  I risked half a grin. “The last time I answered a call like that, I wound up with malaria and a Section Eight.”

  A veteran of the Pacific himself, McCarthy let out a chuckle; then his expression turned serious. “I assure you I have the budget to pay you a respectable sum. I don’t expect you to be a dollar-a-day man, like our late friend Forrestal.”

  “How long would you want me on staff?”

  He rocked in the chair a little, tossed a hand. “Six months should do it. And it would be excellent publicity for you. A real boon to your business. I don’t expect an answer right now. Take some time and mull it. Personally? I think we would be doing each other a great service.”

  I sipped the coffee. Cohn was watching me. I felt like a fly an iguana was contemplating sending a tongue out after.

  I placed the still mostly filled cup on the tray. “I don’t need any time to think it over, Senator. I really have to take a pass on this one. I’m flattered, but—”

  “Now,” McCarthy said, holding up a big hand, as if swearing me in on the witness stand, “don’t be hasty. This could take your career to a whole new level.”

  Or depths.

  I said, “I just opened a Manhattan office, and I still run Chicago myself. I’m the only one coordinating the three branches. Really, I don’t have anybody on staff who could take my place.”

  Cohn was still looking at me with those cold hooded eyes. He had skin the color of the scum on butterscotch pudding. “Maybe there’s another reason why you’re turning down this opportunity.”

  A question, even an accusation, was buried in that statement.

  I gave him my own cold look. Slapping him would have been rude. “And what would that be?”

  Tiny toss of the head. “Maybe we’re not on the same team.”

  “Care to clarify that?”

  Cohn shrugged one shoulder, placed his as-yet-unsipped coffee cup on the desk, though he could just as easily have set it on the tray. “You were seen talking to Hammett. After he testified.”

  “So what?”

  “You were then seen getting into a cab with him. You were also seen going to a well-known local restaurant, where you talked for over an hour.”

  I swiveled in the chair toward him. “I had lunch with the man. He hadn’t eaten before he testified. Again—so what?”

  “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “He’s a writer I admire who I took the opportunity to meet. Don’t you like The Thin Man, Roy? Nick and Nora? Asta?”

  Cohn ignored that. “Did he offer you a job? Did you turn that down?”

  Was this humorless little prick psychic? I noted that McCarthy, sitting there like a blue-jawed Buddha, fingers laced on his belly again, was just letting his hatchet man do the dirty work.

  Unsettled in spite of myself, I said, “How is this your business again?”

  Cohn, folding his arms, gave me the tiniest smile in human history and said, “We know all about this ‘concerned citizens’ group of pinks he’s assembled. He should spend more time writing and less time raising funds for traitors.”

  Now McCarthy spoke, no oratory this time: “Were you approached to reopen the Rosenberg case, Nate? To look for new evidence to clear those two Soviet spies?”

  “Suppose I was,” I said. “What then?”

  “If you didn’t say yes,” McCarthy said, “I’d encourage you to reconsider.”

  That made me blink. I admit it.

  I said, “What?”

  The off-white smile blossomed again in the plump sea of blue beard.

  He said, “I’d like you to say yes to the slippery Mr. Hammett, and look into whatever his little Who’s Who of Commies think they have.”

  “Why in hell?”

  Cohn summoned a bigger smile. The second smallest on record, but a smile. “We want you to work for us, Mr. Heller. Undercover.”

  * * *

  The headquarters of the journalist called by Time magazine “the most intensely feared and hated man in Washington” was hidden away on a quaint Georgetown corner within a rambling faded yellow-brick Federal-style town house. I didn’t recall ever coming here in the evening before, and in the street-lamp glow, the old house, with its many shutters, brick sidewalk, and brass trimmings, had an almost soothing effect.

  Not at all soothing was the bustling newsroom-like office area a few steps down from the entry, typewriters chattering, news tickers ticking, telephones shrilling. As in McCarthy’s Senate suite, half a dozen or more young professionals were lost in work at desks or at the long gray row of filing cabinets, sometimes moving in or out of smaller offices. This was mid-evening, so some late-edition-style deadline had to be driving them.

  I’d been greeted by a lovely, shapely redhead in a simple, simply astonishing green dress. She was the married boss’s latest secretary, the current “fair-haired girl” (actual hair color not an issue). The other young women in the office were attractive enough, but in a pencil-behind-the-ear, hair-up, horn-rimmed-glasses way. As opposed to the Esquire magazine cartoon way.

  Her boss was in a small office that looked more like a den—dark plaster walls with framed original political cartoons and signed celebrity photos; a working fireplace with an amateur rural landscape over it and family snapshots lining the mantel; windowsills stacked with books, magazines, and a slumbering cat; and the big central scarred wooden desk with an in- and out-box, a telephone, a glass jar of Oreo cookies, and a battered portable Corona, where the boss in his maroon smoking jacket was in action.

  No ashtray, though. I wasn’t a smoker, though many people who stopped by here would be. But the man behind the Corona was a Quaker and smoking was out, office-wide. His only vices were some light drinking and of course his fair-haired girls. His wife, who lived on their farm, didn’t seem to mind.

  The redhead announced me at the open door, got a “Send him in,” and stepped aside and gestured for me to enter, as she and I exchanged warm glances. I’d had an affair with the previous “fair-haired girl,” and had nothing else going on tonight. Who could say where a warm glance might lead?

  I just stood there while he finished his current page. Even sitting down he was tall, a trim and sturdy middle-aged man with a little graying dark hair left on the sides of a chrome dome. With his egg-shaped head and waxed mustache, he resembled an American version of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. (I’d read her in my youth, too. I somehow doubted she was a Commie.)

  He finished the page and with a flourish sent it from typewriter to out-box, then sprang to his full six three and held out a hand. He had a winning, rather toothy smile, but he was trying too hard. We hadn’t been back on decent terms that long.

  As we shook, Drew Pearson said, “So what kind of mood did you find our esteemed public servant Joseph McCarthy in? Does he know about your late father’s politics yet?”

  “Somehow that’s eluded his crack investigators.”

  He grunted a laugh from deep in his chest. “You mean that little weasel Cohn? His idea of investigating is looking under beds for Reds.”

  He gestured for me to sit opposite him in a wooden visitor’s chair that was apparently designed to discourage a long stay.

  “I wouldn’t underestimate McCarthy’s snoops,” I said, “especially Cohn. I changed cabs three times coming here, making sure they didn’t fin
d me consorting with the enemy.”

  He sniffed. It was a habit of his, a kind of patrician expression of contempt. “That seems a little excessive.”

  I told him how Cohn had apparently had me followed after I left the Senate hearing.

  He shook his head and said, “No. Probably it was Hammett they were surveilling. Did you change cabs because you saw someone tailing you?”

  People always talked to me like that. Like in a private eye picture.

  “No,” I said. “It was a precaution. Or maybe just paranoia.”

  He fixed his light blue eyes on me and got a twinkle going. “So you met with Hammett, as I requested. How did that go? Did you accept the case?”

  “First you should know that McCarthy and Cohn are already onto what Hammett and his friends are up to.”

  “Hell you say…”

  I gave it all to him, including the offer of a staff investigator position on the committee and how they wanted me to accept Hammett’s job and work undercover for them.

  “Damn,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

  “Well, yes, of course.”

  “What?”

  “The money was good. So is Hammett’s.”

  “Well, who will you really be working for, man?”

  “Same as always. Nathan Heller.” I sat forward and lifted the lid off his glass cookie jar and got myself an Oreo. “Think it through. McCarthy may be able to open doors for me that you and Hammett and company can’t. This is a closed case, with almost everybody I need to talk to in jail.”

  Thinking, Pearson said, “Not everybody’s in jail.…”

  “No, and that’s where you and Hammett’s All-Star Leftists can help out. I’ll need to talk to several un-incarcerated folks, who’ll be understandably gun-shy about opening up to any investigator.”

  The columnist had a cookie, too. He chewed, thought, swallowed. “I may be able to pave the way for that with the Rosenbergs’ lawyer. He’s refused to grant meetings to the justice committee members.”

  He was referring to the National Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, a grassroots group.

  I nodded. “Hammett tells me this lawyer … what’s his name, Manny Something?”